Q&A Colossians 1:24-29

Hey everyone, thanks again for listening to another Q&A with a Pastor. My name is Asher Griffin. I'm sitting down with Keith Goad, where Keith preached a couple of days ago in Colossians 1, verses 24 through 29. Now Keith, in this section we see Paul talking about his ministry, but you were talking about our particular ministry within the Church as well. Kind of walk us through how you looked at the text and saw it not just Paul talking about himself, but Paul giving almost a prescription of how we ought to serve the church. Well, I was looking at Paul as a model of a faithful Christian rather than a super-Christian. Too often in our culture, which that was kind of the intro, Luther actually got rid of the whole idea that priests or monks or nuns are super-Christians and everybody else are not as faithful Christians. Anybody can be a faithful Christian no matter what their vocation or their role is in the church. It's about serving and loving God with all your heart. I would look at Paul and I saw what his desire was for the church, how he sought to serve the church, and I made that the main focus for how we should emulate his modeling of that. So, that was kind of the bridge that had to be made. Yeah, now I know that you're big on expositional preaching and make sure the message of the text is the message of the sermon. Now, where did you get the idea of service, of our service being the main framework of how we examine this? when we don't really see service as the replicated word going in this. So where'd you get that from? There were three words. There's struggling, there's toiling, and then he actually calls himself a deacon, actually, the word that can also be translated as serve. I think it's translated in the ESV as minister, which is not always hopeful. Also, Paul, and the way he's described himself many times as a suffering servant, actually reminded me, I didn't mention this, but In seminary, I remember reading an article that argued that as Jesus was a suffering servant, Paul sees himself and the church as a continuation of suffering servants. And obviously not the suffering servant who died, but it really makes perfect sense in this passage where he is adding to what is lacking in Christ's afflictions, the suffering servants. So, we all are not meant to live happy, blessed lives. without suffering because Christ has suffered for us. No, we're all called to suffer. And so we suffer as we toil and struggle. deepening the church. So, breaking that down a little bit more, we certainly live in a consumer culture and that can be both good and bad depending on which side you are, but in comparison to how Paul was this suffering servant as an extension of Christ's ministry, what is the big difference between being a servant in the church and of the church and being a consumer in the church and of the church? You know, I don't think it's just our culture. I think, you know, a selfish, sinful man is always wanting to say, what have they done for me lately? Or what do I come here for? Looking to say, what, you know, what is everybody else looking, what is everybody else doing for me? Rather than looking around and saying, who needs help? What can I do for others? That's, it's rare to find the folks who are committed to and have developed a lifestyle of thinking and acting in that way. So what it looks like to be a consumer versus a servant is basically the mentality. You can have the mentality of Christ to say, they are more important than me, their needs are more important than mine. Or to look and say, how can others be serving me? Now obviously the beautiful picture of the church is that everybody is mutually depending and caring on one another. what oftentimes is your servants and your givers are giving and the other people are taking and really everyone's left impious on some level. Is that what kind of you were driving at in terms of the aroma of Jefferson Park? You spoke briefly about how we want to reflect the aroma of heaven and then kind of explaining what our aroma is here. What would it look like for Jefferson Park to reflect the aroma of heaven within not being consumers but truly worshipers? Well, the beautiful thing about heaven is that the stench of our sin is gone. And so, you know, bickering and fighting and gossiping, that would be removed. So, that aroma that is oftentimes in churches because they're full of sinners, that needs to be put aside. That needs to be repented of. And so, there's people coming and intentionally making sure we're not hurting other people with our words and our actions. more so in the positive way, so that's kind of a warning. The positive would be, you know, making sure as we come in we're focused completely on Christ. Heaven is all about worshiping God. He is the, there is no sun because He is the light. He is the radiance of heaven and we should want to make sure that the gospel and Jesus Christ are the radiance of our gathering. And so the application there was that we remove our sins, We also set aside our personal opinions as secondary to the primary. And then the other part of that is that we are praying and seeking to be a diverse body. We're diverse generationally. We're also diverse vocationally and socially, but not racially or nationally. Now, I know that within that kind of perspective of trying to have a certain aroma that reflects heaven, everyone brings to church their own opinions and their own preferences. But what personal opinions and preferences do you have, do you and do you think others have, about our church that may not primarily reflect the aroma of Christ and his gospel? And I guess the fairest way to ask that is take us back kind of within your church history when you were in college or whatever. What kind of personal preferences did you have about a church that you tried to overcome or you found not helpful? Can you kind of take us through that and what you think of what we're like at Jefferson Park now? Yeah, I'm wrestling here with saying these are opinions versus dogma because my opinions are important to me. I mean, a conviction I have is that oftentimes in churches I've been in, you know, the worship service, what we call the singing part of the service, I just am very allergic. I mean, this is what you're getting at here. Correct me if I'm wrong. I'm very allergic to it being a show. I actually just despise that. And my conviction is that the whole point of the singing is that we're singing to God as the audience. And so that's one of the things that I well, I think I overreact to, in terms of never having anyone up there who's singing to the church. I'm slowly moving on that, because I think it can be worshipful, but I'm just so opposed to the idea that church is the audience of something, versus God being the audience of everything we do. So there's more opinion. I like a very fine-tuned, ordered service that is just like you know, a well-oiled machine, you know, no hiccups, you always know what's coming next, it's orderly, it's structured. I personally just love that and I, whenever something, you know, there's a hiccup or it's not structured correctly or there's an error in the bulletin, I'm way too distracted by that. That's a sinful aspect of me that just gets very distracted when there's any kind of error or hiccup. I realize there's many people who worship that has very little structure and order. It's not disorderly. Paul does say it needs to be orderly, but I do realize I'm probably overly sensitive to order. Now, the danger here would be to focus on things that people bring baggage with, like, I don't like the carpet or I don't like, you know, the blinders on the wall or, you know, this and that. But what are things that when we come to church we should focus on and rejoice in that we're a body worshiping Christ in this particular manner? Well, kind of the principle I would go with is that your strongest convictions should be what is most explicit and clear in Scripture. We come to gather not because of social statuses or opinions. Whatever is clearest in Scripture and whatever is focused on in Scripture should be our primary focus. Our homes can smell like whatever we want in terms of the opinion stuff. You can wear what you want. You can have the carpet colored however you want at your home. When we come here, we don't want to distract from the things that are explicit and clear. A lot of times we're very upset with things that aren't in Scripture at all. How music is done, what is the style? Those are things that actually aren't described in scripture necessarily. It just says to sing songs and hymns and new songs and psalms. Too many people have used that passage to say hymns and psalms are all you should sing. Well, that doesn't make any sense. That is illogical. I'm going out of repertoire here, sorry. Mainly, the focus is whatever scripture says is clear, which is God, Jesus Christ, the gospel, our sin being warned against, the Holy Spirit and His power, the glory of God, the beauty of God, the holiness of God, the ordinances of the church, what we're supposed to be doing together, praying, reading, being led to holiness, being led to repentance, being hopeful for heaven, being thankful for the gospel. You know, these things that are absolutely abundantly clear in Scripture, that's what we should be coming together to focus on. Because other things, then it's just a matter of discernment to make sure, you know, is my opinion clearly revealed in Scripture, or is it just something that I'm used to? That would be the clear discernment question. So, kind of transitioning from focusing within, how can we view worship with inside our gathering What's a way that we could reach outside and serve in a sacrificial way? I mean, when you ask people that in the same way, what do you look for in yourself and your family and others that are close by? What's a way that you could reach outside yourself and serve in a sacrificial way? Yeah, and one part here is, you know, when I preach, I want to preach boldly and clearly. Well, one of the things I walked away this sermon thinking is that I'm not fulfilling half of the high standard of service that I preached. I preached a very high standard of being completely committed to the body of Christ. And even as the vocational pastor here, I am committed to this body, but I also walked away convicted that there's no way I'm living up to the standard that I just preached. I feel that way every sermon I preach. I want to always lift the bar from what scripture says, and then we'll all try to discipline ourselves to get there. Just to make that clear. How can we be sacrificed from outside? The biggest thing right now is to be committing, even praying, and even fasting, asking God to give us a clear, united vision for where we need to go, according to His will, to be committed. Now, if that's, you know, we mentioned some possibilities, maybe it's in Southwood, maybe it's in the Rainbow House, maybe it's saying, I'm going to do a, I'm going to have a food closet there, I'm going to go and hang a flyer there, I'm going to go and just pray there. You know, sacrificing your time for this outreach movement group, sacrificing your other gifts with your time, that's the clearest, most practical way. Commit your time now to be praying for direction, and then commit your time to fill the tasks that need to be done. Now, I assume that when you reach out to others and you're serving others, we're doing that for the sake of the gospel in order to proclaim and also to encourage people with the gospel, but what does it look like to teach and warn others in a gospel-focused way? I mean, we don't want to knock on it in a negative way, but what does it mean to really teach someone the gospel and to warn them with the truths that we find in the Bible? Without coming, you know, across as judgmental or rude or... or over-corrected. And you're referring here to someone who is not a Christian? I'm referring, well, first to the Christian and then on to the Christian. To the Christian, this should be just a basic lifestyle of getting to know someone to the point where they know you and your sin, not as well as you do, especially not as well as God does. But you continue to go along with a brother or a sister or a spouse and they are able to have the freedom to say, you know, I see you dangerously flirting with this sin. You know, I see you dangerously flirting with the temptation for greed, for lust, whatever that may be. And so there's a warning there, but the warning is your heart is being swayed away, is being swayed too far from God by these things. You know, maybe he's keeping up with the Joneses, maybe he's having a good time, whatever it is. And then you warn that I see you being tempted with this, or maybe you're already in it, and that you then say the gospel of Jesus Christ, He has saved you from being entangled and empowered, being overpowered by these things. You need to embrace the freedom of Christ to be free of them. It's not just one conversation, it's over and over again encouraging and challenging and so forth. The non-Christian, yeah, You know, there's different levels of boldness with which people do this, and some people can get away with a more bold declaration than others and not sound, you know, harshly, you know, damning. But whenever you share the gospel, I mean, kind of the Ray Comfort idea, I don't want to completely embrace that, but I do think there's great wisdom there. His whole point is to say, you first have to point out their sin before they can ever appreciate the gospel. And so with a warning, what you have to help them see is how fallen this world is. And how perverse their heart's affections are. And then they will see, hopefully, that those things are not good in the sight of God. They will be judged, and that will then want to drive them to the cross. Yes, so it's a warning of the false ideas, the lies, and the temptations they have. And then that Lord willing, once they really feel that the Spirit is empowering the evangelism, they will want to come to the cross. So who has permission in this case? Who has permission to warn you and teach you as a pastor and shepherd? Yeah, in an interesting way, I mentioned that I basically have more responsibility in my position as a pastor. And so at some level, I would hope most people in this church would feel the freedom to speak to me if they actually saw a warning. Do not bring a judgment against an elder without witnesses. So maybe it would be a matter of working with the deacons, but primarily the deacons. I would say the deacons are the ones that have permission. That was actually clearly articulated with the last group of deacons. I would want to make sure it's clearly articulated with this group of deacons. My wife would have permission to warn me. So, yeah, that would be the people who have the explicit permission. But at some level, as a pastor, I would hope that most people would have the freedom to talk to me. I try to be as approachable as possible if they saw something. Now, just talking about within the role of being a pastor, I mean, you're certainly looked at to be pious and faithful and in Scripture all the time, but does being a pastor make you more faithful than just someone who would come to church and participate and be part of our body. I mean, you certainly have a different calling, but do you have a more faithful calling? No. If I am faithfully proclaiming the Word and you are faithfully listening, in that moment, that hour, we are both being faithful. Now, I have the, you know, if anything, Scripture says it's a higher responsibility, which we will be held accountable for. So even Sunday morning, I actually don't count that as a work day. That's a day that I get to come and be a member of Jefferson Park Baptist Church. I'm the one that's providing the sermon that day. I'm the one that's been called and set aside for that particular function, that very high calling. I don't want to belittle that at all. It's what's waiting. But I see it as my, yeah, my particular way of being faithful to the body of Jefferson Park, just like Jefferson Park can be faithful by listening. And so, yeah, there is a higher standard, there's a higher responsibility, but I see it just as another way, it's my service as a member of the Catholic Church. Yeah, I was just going to ask if we see your role in servicing Christ, you certainly have different duties and responsibilities, but you don't have a different pursuit of faithfulness than the rest of us. Is that basically how you see that? Yeah. We all are called to be committed wholly to God, to love Him with all our hearts. And God gifts each of us differently to function differently in the body. And a deacon can be just as rewarded and faithful for their service as an elder. Very good. All right, well, Keith, thanks so much for taking time to take some of our questions on Colossians 1, 24 through 29. We look forward to your sermon on Colossians 2 and the first seven verses within that.