A message on the virtues of faith, hope, and love
“3 We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, 4 because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love you have for all the saints— 5 the faith and love that spring from the hope that is stored up for you in heaven and that you have already heard about in the word of truth, the gospel 6 that has come to you.”
Marcus is in his mid-thirties. He is married with a couple of kids. He is somewhat regular in church but, if he had to be honest, Marcus would say that he doesn’t really the see the point of it. It’s not that Marcus wants to be anything other than a Christian, like a Muslim or a Buddhist. It’s just that he doesn’t see the point of church. He doesn’t see anything remarkable happening within himself or anyone else. Marcus is exciting about rock climbing. He is excited about five-on-five basketball tournaments. He is excited about being a dad, but he doesn’t see anything exciting about church.
Do you know anyone like Marcus? Part of Marcus’ problem is that he doesn’t understand what we will study this morning. He doesn’t understand that Christians are the most privileged people imaginable. He doesn’t understand that the intrusion of this faith, hope, and love, which we will study this morning, is the most notable phenomenon that has ever occurred within anyone, and it happens to people who are converted Christ.
For his part, Paul never got over that. He thanked God that he was part of it. He thanked God that these Colossians were part of it. Marcus misses it. Maybe Marcus doesn’t have this faith, hope, and love operating within him. Maybe he does but something is standing in the way of his appreciation of it. Either way, he doesn’t see what Paul sees. He doesn’t see that faith, hope, and love are miraculous. He doesn’t see these as reasons for thanking God. Faith, hope, and love are miraculous. Thank God every time you see them. That’s the claim of this sermon.
We will study this in three points. First: thanking God for His work in you. Second: faith in Christ, love for his people. Third: hope from the word. We see Paul thanking God for His work in the Colossians in verse 3, faith in Christ and love for his people in verse 4, and hope from the word in verse 5 into 6.
First: thanking God for His work in you. Last week we thought a lot about the elements letter writing in Paul’s day. What we see this week is also a standard part of letters at that time. Near the beginning of a letter, a Greco-Roman woman would fill her friend in on what’s been happening in her life by thanking the gods for her good fortune. She would also call upon the gods to give health and wealth to this friend to whom she was writing. Paul turns this standard wish of health and wealth and a bit of news of what’s been going on into a reminder of the miracle that was happening in Colossae.
Paul adapted a standard lettering writing practice for Christian purposes because the gospel had saturated his life and altered it. A letter address became a chance to encourage these people that they didn’t simply live in Colossae, but that they lived “in Christ.” A throwaway line about what’s been happening became a profound truth about the wonder of what it means to be a Christian. The gospel transforms the stuff of life. Letters become encouragements. The love of family is extended outside the family. Homes become hospitable. The grace that operates in the human hearts cannot help but change the normal stuff of life. It’s worth considering how it’s changes yours.
Paul thanked God for what was happening in Colossae; verse 3, “We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, because we have heard of your faith…” Paul wasn’t praising the Colossians for what they had become. He was praising God for what God was doing in these people. This isn’t about recognizing an amazing group of people. This isn’t about being excited about momentum in a church. That might be what Marcus wants, but this is about recognizing that God was at work in these unimpressive people in Colossae. He was, as we will see, filling them with faith, hope, and love. That’s far more exciting than momentum because momentum can be manufactured. God’s work can’t. That’s why Paul thanked God for it.
Paul often remembered what was happening in Colossae. That’s what’s going on with, “We always thank God…” in verse 3. This doesn’t mean “continually”—as in “you are on my mind in every waking moment.” This language of “always” refers to all of Paul’s prayers. Paul, like a pious Jew, prayed three times a day—morning, noon, and night. In each of those three prayers, Paul thanks God for what He was doing in these Colossians. This meant that Paul prayed three times a day, twenty-one times a week, ninety a month for these people whom he had never met. He did that because this most remarkable gift that could be given to anyone had been given to these Colossians—they had faith, hope, and love. Not only Paul did praise God for this, but Timothy did as well; that’s almost certainly what’s behind verse 3’s, “We always thank God…”
We would do well to learn from these two. A few weeks ago, we had any number of ministries here for Missions Sunday. How many of those ministries caught our interest? How many of these ministries were or have become part of our prayers? It doesn’t need to be those ministries, but it is worth considering if there is any work of the Lord that has so captured our hearts that we want to pray for it every time we pray. That would show that we are excited about what excites God. Don’t pretend to be excited. Ask God to excite your heart by what excites His.
Paul was certainly excited about what excites God in this prayer. He was excited about what Jesus came to accomplish. It’s hard to say with any integrity that you adore Jesus if you aren’t excited to meet other people who have faith in him, who love with his love, and whose only hope is in him. Paul was. Marcus isn’t. The question is, “are we?” Being excited that some people were leaving confusion, hopelessness, and apathy behind for this faith, hope, and love we will study is certainly a Christ-like impulse. After all, Christ died so that people could make this transition. He died so that you could.
We see the first two marks of this transition in our second point: faith in Christ, love for his people. Paul rejoiced in what was happening in the lives of these Colossians because he knew what genuine conversion looked like. He knew the marks. He knew that he was experiencing them. He knew these Colossians were experiencing them based on what Epaphras had told him. Our spiritual vitality as a church has a good deal to do with whether we know and appreciate these marks. If we don’t or if these marks don’t impress us, we like Marcus will be bored by the work of God in the world. That’s a spiritually deadly place to live.
Different New Testament authors use different language to refer to these marks of genuine conversion. The faith-hope-love triad is one of Paul’s favorites. He uses it here—and in Romans, Galatians, and Ephesians.
First is faith; verse 4, “because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus.” These Colossians had heard about Jesus of Nazareth from Epaphras. They didn’t simply agree with what Epaphras said about Jesus; they were gripped by it. Prior to Epaphras’ visit, they build their lives upon a different foundation—for some it was reputation, for others it was money, for others it was pleasure. They were building their lives on the sand, to borrow Jesus’ imagery. Now they were building their lives on the rock. They were putting Jesus’ commands into practice because they had faith in him.
They put their faith in Christ based on what Epaphras had told them about Christ. In other words, their faith had everything to do with doctrine. Do you believe that Jesus came to save sinners? So did the Colossians. That’s doctrine. Do you believe that Jesus shows you what God is like? So did the Colossians. That’s doctrine. There is no faith in Christ without doctrine about Christ. Considering doctrine to be the enemy of the church is like considering getting to know what your wife really thinks to be the enemy of your marriage. The blithe dismissal of doctrine in our day tells you almost everything you need to know about the state of the church. Many people seem to want to know Jesus without wanting to know anything specific about him. It has gotten us nowhere and will get us nowhere. Faith in Christ is what is needed and that requires an understanding of who he is and what he does.
The Colossians had that and that excited Paul. Now let’s not think for a second that this Colossian church was a collection of Bible scholars down to the smallest child. They were regular people—they probably won’t have impressed Marcus—but they did have genuine faith in Jesus and that is more amazing than we tend to recognize. If you have genuine faith in Jesus, you should, at times, be startled by that fact. You should consider yourself privileged.
That’s faith. Now we turn our attention to love; verse 4, “because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love you have for all the saints.” Love is the fulfilment of the law. Paul was saying that these people made it their purpose to keep the commandments when they dealt with one another. They didn’t steal from each other. Instead, they were willing to share with each other. They weren’t arrogant in their dealings with one another. Instead, they made it a point to consider each other more significant than themselves. Parents, isn’t that what you want with your kids? “I’m taking a shower; just keep the commandments in the way you deal with each other until I get out.”
Paul knew that these Colossians loved one another because Epaphras had told him about their life together. Now, as we saw with faith, the Colossian church wasn’t filled with love-experts, but there was genuine love among them. Some of us don’t yet realize how precious that is. We don’t yet realize how alienating and loveless this world can be. Paul saw the remarkable nature of the Colossians’ simple acts of love—a woman sitting with a sick friend, a man stepping out of his comfort zone to get to know a visitor, an offering taken to alleviate the suffering of their fellow Christians who were persecuted—people learning to love as God had loved them. This was love and it like faith is more astounding than we realize.
Love for fellow Christians is a non-negotiable mark of conversion—“the love you have for all the saints” as verse 4 puts it or, “We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love each other,” as John puts it.
The first step toward loving others is to admit that you are impossibly hopeless at it. The first step toward loving others is to admit with the Catechism that your natural tendency is to hate God and your neighbor. Until you confess your lovelessness, you will never love with the love of God. You will never love the people in this congregation with anything like the love of Christ.
These people right here are the people you are to love. When I taught senior Catechism, I would tell the students who were preparing to leave home that they would find it just as difficult to love the people whom they were about to meet as it is to love their family members. The same could go for the loving the people in this congregation. There are different temperaments and a different set of expectations in college or the workplace when compared with your family or in a different church compared with this church, but no matter where you go you are going to deal with people who will, by their demeanor, words, and actions give you plenty of persuasive reasons not to love them. They will be as difficult as your family members and maybe more so. The only irrefutable reason to love such people, or anyone, is that while you were still His enemy, God loved you and while you were still his enemy, Christ died for you. That’s love. It’s not that we first loved anyone. It’s that we were first loved by God and so we are called to love these people with whom we are placed. You can’t love in theory. You can’t love, “if only this or that.” The only way to love is to do so with the people you’ve got. That’s not as glamorous as the virtue-signaling we see in our culture but considering that love is the fulfillment of God’s commands towards other people you surely must recognize that twenty-first century America might not be the best source of authority on loving. America, like Marcus, probably wouldn’t be all that impressed with what was going in Colossae. Paul was. “He who has eyes to see, let him see,” to paraphrase Jesus.
That’s faith and love. We complete the triad with hope; that’s our final point: hope from the word. We could spend weeks examining the interrelationship between faith, hope, and love. We could talk about how faith expresses itself in love. We could talk about expressing love results in firmer faith. This isn’t the only word on the relationship between faith, hope, and love, but it the one before us one; “we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love you have for all the saints— the faith and love that spring from the hope that is stored up for you in heaven…”
So faith springs from hope. How? Well, your Father has promised you eternal pleasures at His right hand, as Psalm 16:11 puts it. Those pleasures are the object of your hope. Faith recognizes that since God has promised you eternal pleasures in the future, it stands to reason that His will for you in every moment until you enjoy those pleasures must be equally generous. The beauty of the hope promised inclines you to present faith in the Promise Maker.
Jesus promised that because of what he has done you can face God unafraid on judgment day. That’s the object of your hope. Faith recognizes that since Jesus has promised you this justification at the final judgment, it stands to reason that you can live as if you are justified today. Based on your hope of being declared right with God on the last day, you can live by faith that you are right with God today.
Now let’s think about how love springs from hope. God has promised to meet your every need. That’s Philippians 4:19, “my God will meet all your needs according to the riches of his glory in Christ Jesus.” As you put your hope in that promise for each future day, you are freed up to love others today. You can busy yourself with the needs of others because you know that your needs will be met by God.
You’ve also been promised that God will reward you based on what you’ve done. That’s the object of your hope. This frees you up to love others without calculating the results. Most likely you will love a lot of ungrateful people. Jesus did. Only one of the ten lepers returned. You can continue to do so because you have the hope of reward from God. If you take that hope seriously, you will keep on loving.
That hope had taken hold in Colossae. It was happening because the people believed the word; verse 5, “you have already heard about in the word of truth, the gospel that has come to you.” They Colossians heard Epaphras and believed. They truly believed that God would do what He promised to do in the future and that changed their lives in the present. The word gave them hope for the future and so they lived by faith and love today. That sounds like a very happy way to live. It is. I hope you are living it. That’s why Paul thanked God that the Colossians were living that way.
You can look at church the way Marcus does or the way Paul does. Marcus’s way is the way of spiritual impoverishment. As GK Beale wrote about these verses, “spiritual impoverishment comes when believers do not prayerfully contemplate the experience of God’s grace in their lives, and such impoverishment results in an unthankful experience.” That’s Marcus’s experience Sunday after Sunday and day after day. Paul’s experience was different. He finds himself amazed as what God is doing. Which experience is yours? Do you have eyes to see faith, hope, and love? Amen.