Q&A Colossians 1:1-8

Hey everybody, thanks again for listening to a Q&A with a pastor. Today's Q&A is going to be about the sermon from January 15th where Keith preached on Colossians chapter 1 verses 1 through 8. Now Keith, first of all, just starting off, why did you choose to preach through Colossians and what overall does Colossians teach us? I chose to choose, I chose, I chose to choose, I chose Colossians because I wanted to go a New Testament book. We just spent the majority of 2011 in Genesis after starting in 1 John back in 2010. And so I wanted to go back to the New Testament book, go New Testament, Old Testament. Had an opportunity to do some Psalms between, but I wanted to go New Testament book. And so I wanted to go Pauline. And I asked what the church had had opportunity to study in years past. I know they had just done Wednesday Night Philippians, and it seemed like Colossians hadn't been taught in a while. And I personally love the book of Colossians. It's one of the more philosophical and theologically deep books. And so I wanted it to go there. That's one. What does it teach? I summarized the theme as this, Christ is all I need, I need to want nothing else. The Colossian problem is one where the church was seeking to add something to Christ to make their salvation better, or more secure, or more sure. And so the whole point is, as they know, Christ is all you need. Christ is all you can get. And once you start adding to Him, you really lose the benefit of what He has accomplished for you. Alright, now the entire theme of the January 15th worship service was thankful for the gospel. But before we get into that, Keith, what is the gospel in short? What are we thankful for? We are thankful that the God who created this world did not give up on it whenever we rebelled against Him. That the Father sent His Son to become like us in every way, so that the Son, who is fully divine, took on a perfect human nature, but one without sin. So, He's like us in every way, except for He doesn't have sin, whereas we are, by nature, sinful. He came to live a life that was fully pleasing to the Father. as a human, being the second Adam. And then most importantly, he died on the cross in the place of sinful man. So he, the innocent man, died in the place of sinful man. So when the wrath of God was poured out upon him, our sins, if we believe in him, are forgiven. The wrath of God is no longer going to be poured out upon us. We are now adopted into his sonship. We are adopted into his kingdom. We are brought in as saints. We are declared innocent. We are declared separate from this world. And he rose again, giving us assurance and hope of eternal life. And he's going to come again. And that's whenever he will finish the redemption and we will receive glorified bodies. You mentioned that we are supposed to be thankful in all of this. Now, what does it mean to be thankful in the gospel? You said that thankfulness does always not present itself in zeal and gregariousness, so is there a proper way to be thankful in the gospel? Yeah, so it's, one of the things I was trying to do there was help people realize there are more, there are multiple ways that we can express thankfulness. We all have different personalities, we all have different ways of expressing thankfulness. So, what I see in our culture is that, especially the evangelical culture, is that If we're not shouting and dancing and screaming and so forth, then we must not really love Jesus. There's a certain perception among some, not really in this church I don't think, but among some, that if you're not shouting loudly with just great laughter and joy, you're not expressing a deep thankfulness. Whereas I respond in a completely different way. Well, even if I get a gift from somebody else, let's say it's not the gift of the gospel, When I receive a gift that was just completely over and above anything I expected or I didn't expect a gift at all, I'm typically just overwhelmed and close to speechless. Oftentimes when I'm singing about the gospel, you know, in Christ Alone, one of the songs, I can never sum that song from start to finish because at some point I'm always overwhelmed with what God has done for me. And I just have to, I can't, I can't get the words out anymore because I'm actually overwhelmed. And so when I think of being thankful, you know, I don't think of a three-year-old who opens up a package and says, thanks mom. It's what I always wanted, you know, and then throws it so we can pick up the next gift. No, I see an adult who has deep emotions and affections and wants and needs and they receive something that is completely more than they could ever ask for. Completely overwhelming and you're left speechless. Very much like a woman who would not be expecting an engagement ring even though she would want one. How would most respond to that? Would they giggle and jump and start shouting, look at me, look at me? Or would they be speechless? There's different personalities. Discontentment. Yeah. I mean, just overwhelmed with joy. Now, yes, some people may shout and scream. I'm not saying that's not a proper response. I just think a more normal response would be overwhelmed and speechless. Very good. Well, you spoke briefly in your introduction about things that we want and things that we need, and you kind of compared and contrast those. And you said that there certainly are things that we need in life, such as food and water. But within the gospel, there are no more emotional needs that we have. But are there needs in life that we must need even with the gospel? Thinking specifically about relationships, do you need a relationship even if you are bought for Christ? Yeah, I think even whenever I... So what I was trying to do was show that we were created as finite physical beings to need certain things. We are dependent upon air, food, and water. And I threw in there, and that's the... and shelter. That's kind of the typical list you get in school. These are the things you have to have to exist. I think in order to exist, you really need relationships. I think Tom Hanks proved that with his friend Wilson on Castaway. I don't know if he proved it, but he demonstrated it. Well-being. In order to have well-being, you have to have relationships as well. Okay, so what do I mean that Christ is all I need? Christ is all I need to have a right relation with God. Christ is all I need to have peace and freedom and joy and hope. Now, Christ instituted his church, and so I need brothers and sisters who are going to point out my sin or remind me of the gospel, teach me about His love and remind me of His love. And so, when I say Christ is all I need, it's His death and His resurrection, but He's also instituted all these things all around me, spiritual disciplines, that will help me remember that I need Him. So, in order to really go through this life and enjoy it as a Christian, I do believe you need to be part of a church where true spiritual discipline is going to take place, because that's His body. One of the points in your sermon was that the gospel bears fruit. Now, should you make bearing fruit a personal goal? And how do you make it a desire to bear fruit rather than a duty? Yeah, actually, bearing fruit came up in this past week's sermon on verses 9 through 14, and then the last week's sermon that we're talking about now, verses 1 through 8, and there it seemed like it was saying, as the gospel goes out, it bears fruit, and that would be the gospel fruit of conversion. of new confession and profession of Jesus Christ. So, when I look at it from that way, there's clearly a fruit of going out. The gospel is God's power to save sinners. And so, the gospel fruit that we should expect is that when we pray for opportunities to share the gospel, we pray for conversions, that God will save those he wants to save. The power of the gospel is able to save. And so, we should expect the fruit of conversion when we share the gospel as God wills to save. Now, the other question I think you're thinking of more in terms of fruit would be this week, you know, as we think about being fruitful in every good work. That is more spiritual fruit. We'll save that until the next Q&A. How about that? Well, I just hope I don't forget the question. Well, my answer to that is this. We should expect fruit. The hard part is, is fruit a duty, or is it something we should just desire? I think it's something we should expect, and we should hope to gain through discipline. When you make it a duty, it seems like that can become legalistic, because then you've got to put up the front that you have fruit. So in rightly pursuing God, we should expect fruit from ourselves? Yeah. One of the main points, and certainly one that people remarked most about in an encouraging way, is that the gospel is our sure foundation. I wonder in the context of friendships and relationships how we can continually seek the gospel as our foundation. I say that within the context of Everybody has different kinds of friends, so sometimes you have your sports friends, or you might talk to these guys about doctrine a lot, and these guys about your kids a lot. How do you make sure that your relationships and your friendships always go back to the gospel as the foundation of those relationships? Yeah, I mean every relationship I have in the church is a different level of, you know, how much we talk about the gospel versus other things. My goal is to always increase the amount of gospel talk. I try to evaluate where each person is and make sure I'm promoting and encouraging more. That's why we do the sermon Q&A and the sermon discipleship questions, to try to give opportunity to talk about those things. Those are actually ways to encourage gospel conversations in the church. So, if I go to lunch with Bill, who doesn't actually exist, we don't have anybody named Bill at the church. If I happen to go to church with a guy named Bill, I'm going to say, hey, you know, the sermon this past week, what did you think of this? And then, you know, lead into one of those tougher questions. I think our conversations, our friendships, we're united in Christ. You know, we're going to get into that a lot more later on in Colossians. We're united because of Christ, not because of our interest in sports or anything else. And so my primary relationship with each member of this church is as a brother to a sister or a brother. It's the fact that we all share the same inheritance as saints. And so as much as we can make that the common ground of what we talk about, the healthier this church is going to be. So we have to, I would encourage everyone to make that more and more of what we talk about. Yeah, we're going to talk about, you know, this past week after lunch, we talked about Newt winning South Carolina, sadly. We talked about the football games. Which your teams lost. Oh, they all lost, sadly. Yeah, yeah. But we talked about the gospel. It was a good conversation about how we each were challenged differently by the sermon. And so, the gospel isn't all we talk about. But the gospel needs to be the most central, most important thing we talk about. We cannot not talk about the gospel. We cannot talk about football. We cannot talk about South Carolina. We can't not talk about the gospel. Now, last question. You said that there's a danger in having a headless church. And then I'm going to ask you to explain that. And then there's also a danger in having a bodyless church. I'm going to ask you to explain that too, but what leads up to those after you define those terms? What leads up to having a headless and a bodiless church? And then what is generally their outcome? Yeah, a headless church would be a church that no longer submits to the absolute authority of Jesus Christ as the head. And so it's a body of people, which ultimately, you know, eventually you start questioning what Jesus really said. It usually would begin with something like, can a woman lead, you know, be the pastor? That would be something that, you know, one of the typical things that would, one of the typical first fruits of someone who's rejecting the authority of Jesus Christ. And then it gets into, does he really demand that we obey everything he says? You know, so a headless body is a group of people that are coming together because they call themselves Christians, but they're coming together not to worship and exalt Christ and to obey him. but to obey other principles which they have set aside as their own authority. And so the mission of those churches oftentimes will be more social good and social work, apart from gospel proclamation. So a headless body really kind of becomes a social network of people who are like-minded, apart from Christ, or they have the same lifestyle, the same desires, it's just not Christ's desires. Now a bodiless head, that was more of a way, maybe not as clever, to talk about a long-ranger Christian. You know, someone who isn't, who only believes in the universal church. They don't believe in the local body and the need to be committed to other believers. who are like-minded underneath the Hedgehog of Christ, united under the Hedgehog of Christ, and doing the work of Christ together. Both of those are major problems in America. A lot of churches reject Christ as their absolute authority. And a lot of Christians want Jesus Christ as their absolute authority, but don't want to do it with other Christians. They don't want to partner together. They want to do it their way. The only way they know how to. They don't know how to get along with others in many ways. So both are errors because Christ the head has instituted his body. Now what leads up to those generally? How does our church avoid those? How does our church avoid those? Well, by continuing to build deep relationships that are built upon the gospel, which means we're talking about our sin regularly. We're seeing the fruit of talking about our sin regularly in light of the gospel. We're talking about how good Christ is. We're pointing out the evidence of grace in one another. We're pointing out sin. More of the evidence of grace. That's what we talked about this past week. The way you avoid those is by being a body really always united under the headship of Christ. What leads, like I said earlier, what leads to the lack of a head is typically wanting to say, you know, what Jesus said there doesn't really fit with the social norms today. So, issues of egalitarianism or wanting to accept homosexuality as normative or wanting to accept divorce as normative. Those kind of things, you know, whenever our sinful wills want to overthrow the authority of Christ, We kind of have a Henry VIII syndrome there. We want to overthrow the authority above us, so we remake our own rules. What makes us become a bodiless head? That's just the individualism of America, not wanting to depend upon other people. Okay. So they're both, in essence, selfish. It's just one, you're selfish with other people, and one, you're selfish by yourself. Yeah. Alright, well that's all the questions I've got for January the 15th sermon. Keith, thanks for answering these questions and I look forward to asking you more questions about Colossians 9 through 14.