A message on reconciling with God
“21 Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because off your evil behavior. 22 But now He has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation— 23 if you continue in your faith, established and firm, not moved from the hope held out in the gospel. This is the gospel that you heard and that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become a servant.”
We’ve been thinking about people’s stories at the beginning of these sermons on Colossians. They’re all made up, but just because something is fiction doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Today let’s think about Gordon. Gordon is a cynical man who would say that he has a lot to be cynical about. Gordon might at times say that he is a Christian, but he thinks that much of Christianity is—when push comes to shove—just wishful thinking. Gordon picks and chooses how he wants to live for himself. He thinks of himself as a golden rule kind of guy. He does unto others as they should do unto him even though, as Gordon would add, people don’t always do unto him as they should. Gordon is precisely the kind of guy who needs to hear the good news of the gospel. We are all precisely the kind of people who need to hear and keep hearing the good news of the gospel. The good news is that God has turned us, His enemies, into His friends. We live by that hope and if we lose that hope all is lost. That’s the claim of this sermon: The good news is that God has turned us, His enemies, into His friends. We live by that hope and if we lose that hope all is lost.
We will study this in four points. First: alienated from God. Second: reconciled through Christ. Third: continuing in the faith. Fourth: proclaiming the gospel. We see in verse 21 that humanity is by nature alienated from God. We see in verse 22 that we can be reconciled to God through Christ. We see in verse 23a that we who are reconciled must continue in the faith and we see in verse 23b that this is the gospel which Paul proclaimed, and we are to proclaim.
First: alienated from God. We start with one of Paul’s favorite devices—the once/now. You were once in that horrible situation; now you are in this wonderful situation. You were once under the curse of the law; now you live by the freedom of the Spirit. You once thought about Jesus as if he were a mere man; now you see him as the God-man. You were once enslaved to what is worthless; now you are free so live free. You were once enemies of God; now you are friends of God. Verse 21 is the once half of the once/now; “Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because off your evil behavior…”
Paul was reminding the Colossians of their pagan past to contrast it with their current life in Christ. Paul wrote this letter to remind the Colossians that Jesus was better than anything else and that they would be foolish to wander away from him to pursue satisfaction anywhere else. In this verse he was reminding them of what it was like not to know Jesus; “once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because off your evil behavior.”
Some of us have never known that experience. Some of us grew up like Ruth Graham—Billy Graham’s wife—who said that she couldn’t remember a time when she didn’t know Jesus. That’s a gift. That’s a gift we want to pass on to the next generations. These Colossians didn’t have that. They grew up in paganism. They were alienated from God. “Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because off your evil behavior.”
There is no neutrality when it comes to God. Unless people know Him, trust Him, and seek Him, they behave as if He were their enemy. That’s because their sin has made Him their enemy. God isn’t looking to make enemies, but our sin makes us enemies with Him. Imagine someone betraying you, lying to you, refusing to give you your due, and acting as if you didn’t exist. That sounds like an adversarial way to treat someone to me. That’s the way in which humanity by nature treats God.
Now amazingly it is God who wants to reconcile this relationship. He has done nothing wrong and yet wants to make things right. In our shame we sometimes hesitate to make a relationship right when we are mostly in the wrong. In our pride we sometimes hesitate to make a relationship right when we are mostly in the right. God is eager to make the relationship right even though He is entirely in the right. Praise God that He isn’t like us. We see how God makes this relationship right in our second point: reconciled through Christ.
This is the “now” half of the once/now; verse 22, “But now He has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in His sight, without blemish and free from accusation.” These Colossians once lived like God’s enemies, but now they had been reconciled to God.
Reconciliation is wonderful. If you’ve even been at odds with someone and gone through the hard work of putting the relationship right with someone else who is willing to make it right, you know how sweet the other side is. Couples go to marriage counseling in hopes of reaching the sweetness on the other side. They are willing to do some soul searching to see where they might be wrong and where their relationship has gone wrong in order to put it right. They are willing to go through the pain of being vulnerable with hurts and hearing how they’ve hurt their spouse because they want the goodness of reconciliation. They do it because they believe that reconciliation is worth it.
God thinks that reconciliation is worth it and the good news about this reconciliation process is that it is all God’s doing. That’s great news because you know the reconciliation process will work. Look at verse 22, “now He has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in His sight, without blemish and free from accusation. Who is doing the work in verse 22? God. We humans have turned God into our enemy, and it is this God whom we’ve offended who starts, carries out, and completes the process of reconciling us to Himself. God is the hero of this story. It’s all Him. “You contribute nothing to your salvation except the sin that made it necessary,” as Jonathan Edwards put it.
God reconciled people to Himself by way of Christ’s cross. That’s what’s going on with this talk of Jesus’ physical body; “But now He has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body.” The phrase “physical body” seems a bit redundant, but Paul was most likely contrasting Jesus’ body which hung on the cross with Jesus’ body the church, which we studied last week. Paul wants us to know that he is talking about the cross.
The cross is the means by which God makes peace with us His enemies. That’s why we Christians love the cross. That’s why we put it in our sanctuaries. That’s why we write hymns with words like, “In the cross, in the cross, be my glory ever; from the cross my ransomed soul, nothing then shall sever.” The cross does for us what we could never do for ourselves. The cross turned we who were enemies of God into friends of God. It can still do it.
Now the more you own your disposition to enmity towards God, the greater joy you will find in the cross. The more hatred towards God you recognize within yourself—and even the most sanctified Christians has a fair bit of that lingering within them—the more security you will find in your friendship with God because God knew what you were like when He became your friend. “While you were still God’s enemy Christ died for you.” You’re never going to show God any true, ugly colors that He didn’t already know about you when He sent His Son to die for your sins. Stop trying to be worthy of God’s love and recognize that the cross is what reconciles you. God has done it all. Your role is to receive it.
Receiving it changes you. It makes you, in the words of verse 22, “holy in His sight, without blemish and free from accusation.” What adjectives would you use to describe the way in which the Father sees you—filthy? Possible moral failure? Near hopeless case? Disappointment? How about holy? How about without blemish? How about free from accusation? That’s how God sees His reconciled children.
Sit with that for a while. Sometimes receiving grace is the most uncomfortable of experiences. Why is it so hard for you to hear that you are holy in God’s sight? You are holy in God’s sight. You are holy in God’s sight. You are holy in God’s sight. Wrestle whatever pushback you see arising in your heart and throttle it. You are holy in God’s sight. That’s what the Father says. That’s what the Father says if… If what? That’s our third point: continuing in the faith.
This word from God doesn’t end with verse 22, “But now He has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in His sight, without blemish and free from accusation.” It keeps going, “without blemish and free from accusation if you continue in your faith, established and firm, not moved from the hope held out in the gospel.”
That “if” is real. People harden their hearts to the hope of the gospel. They come to see Christianity as merely something with which they grew up. Like training wheels on a bike, it had its purpose, but now it’s not really needed. “When I was a child, I thought like a child, I talked like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish things behind me.” Many a person has, in essence, thought that about Christianity. Many a person has come to believe that they’ve seen too much of life to believe the Bible. If such people continue on that path, any thought that having been baptized or having professed faith or once really liking religious music serving as some sort of assurance of salvation bumps up against the “if” of verse 23, “if you continue in your faith, established and firm, not moved from the hope held out in the gospel.”
The perseverance of the saints says the saints persevere. It isn’t a promise that anyone who had contact with church or Christian influence is born again. It says that those who are born again continue in the faith because it is the Holy Spirit who has made them alive and keeps them alive.
That means that if you know Jesus, you need to hold on to your hope for dear life. This hope is the promise that you will be finally and fully reconciled to God. This hope is the promise that your dying to your self and your dying to sin are leading and will lead to true life. This hope is the promise that God will make all things, including you, new. Your own flesh, the world, and the devil will give you plenty of reasons to doubt that hope. They will point out plenty of off ramps from the narrow way. You need to hold on to the hope that God is doing and will do what He says He will do.
Some of us had a powerful reminder of that this past week. Bethany and I went at the Andrew Peterson concert at Dordt, and we saw some of you there. Holding on to Christian hope lest your heart grow hard is part of Peterson’s most famous song Is He Worthy? It’s a call and response song. “Do you feel the world is broken? We do. Do you feel the shadows deepen? We do. But do you know that all the dark won’t stop the light from getting through? We do. Do you wish that you could see it all made new? We do. Does the Father truly love us? He does. Does the Spirit move among us? He does. And does Jesus, our Messiah hold forever those he loves? He does. Does our God intend to dwell again with us? He does.”
Now why would you ever want to jeopardize or forfeit those promises by choosing anything other than Christ? That’s the burden of this letter to the Colossians and that’s the reason for that “if” of verse 23, “if you continue in your faith, established and firm, not moved from the hope held out in the gospel.”
Maybe your heart is hardening to this hope. Maybe you no longer actually believe that when push comes to shove that God intends to dwell again with us. Maybe you’ve long stopped believing that the Father truly loves us and now you are just going through the motions. Maybe you are making peace with sin because righteousness doesn’t seem worth what you will have to give up. Don’t think you can cherish sin and find security in being considered holy in God’s sight. The cross that puts sin to death calls us to put sin to death. Or maybe you’ve grown so cynical that you don’t think God can or will make any beauty of out of life. There are plenty of ways that hope dims. Take today as an opportunity to commit yourself to continuing on in the faith. Take today as an opportunity to refuse to be moved from the hope held out in the good news about Jesus.
Paul wrote this letter so that these church-involved Colossians wouldn’t functionally lose their connection with Jesus who died to reconcile them to God. We are working our way through this letter and now we come to this verse with this big warning of “if” and we church-involved Americans need to be reminded not to functionally lose our connection with Jesus who died to reconcile us to God.
Now each of these three elements—a recognition of alienation from God by way of sin, an owning of the reconciliation God provided by way of the cross, and a continuing on in this hope—each of these elements is and has always been part of the gospel message. That’s our final point: proclaiming the gospel.
Those three elements that I just recounted—the first three points of this sermon—might sound more familiar to those of us who grew up learning the Heidelberg Catechism as guilt, grace, and gratitude or, if you learned it as the three S’s—sin, salvation, service. This is just the gospel message packaged in a different form; verse 23b, “This is the gospel that you heard and that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven.”
Paul was pleading with the Colossians not to give up on the gospel but to dive deeper in. That’s the call. When there is a lack of satisfaction, the answer isn’t to look elsewhere but rather to know Christ better. Remember what M’Cheyne said, “Unfathomable oceans of grace are in Christ for you. Dive and dive again, you will never come to the bottom of these depths. How many millions of dazzling pearls and gems are at this moment hid in the deep recesses of the ocean caves.” Jesus will never disappoint provided that you are willing to die to yourself to have him. That’s what Knowing God, Seeking the Spirit, and Imitating Christ is all about. It is the way of satisfaction. That’s what we hopefully want and that’s what we hopefully want for others.
Paul wanted this satisfaction for others, which is why he, in the words of verse 23, “proclaimed to every creature under heaven.” Now this call to have the gospel preached to every creature has been misunderstood, but delightfully so. Please bring up the picture.
This is Francis of Assisi preaching to the birds. He literally did that because verse 23, “This is the gospel that you heard and that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven.” Now that’s not what this verse is about, but I hope your beats with Assisi’s in that you want to apply God’s word even though you get it wrong. We don’t want to be the sort of people who don’t apply and yet criticize those who apply imperfectly.
When Paul wrote, “This is the gospel that you heard and that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become a servant,” he was exaggerating the scope of preaching the gospel to make clear that this gospel was what was needed by everyone everywhere. The false teachers in Colossae had a message that was designed to scratch precisely where the Colossians itched. That’s common spiritual teaching in every age. The gospel is actually what is needed by everyone everywhere whether they know it or not. That’s what the world needs. That’s what we need too.
By speaking of every creature under heaven, Paul was also reiterating that this good news about Jesus tells us how God will make all creation right. Remember, “Jesus is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” Remember, “God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in Him, and through Him to reconcile to himself all things.” The purpose of any sermon doesn’t end when we leave the sanctuary. When we leave the sanctuary is where the sermon finds it purpose. That’s when you face life and you start having conversations in your own head. “Do you feel the world is broken? We do. Do you feel the shadows deepen? We do. But do you know that all the dark won’t stop the light from getting through? We do. Do you wish that you could see it all made new? We do.” That’s when you must continue in the hope of this good news.
That’s the hope that you need. You know that hope. That’s the hope that Gordon needs. He doesn’t know it. He just knows the world is broken. He just feels the shadows deepen. He needs the good news. That’s what we have to offer. We offer nothing less than Jesus and there is nothing better that we could offer. Amen.