Tag Archives: community

Imagine that you find yourself unable to do something you want to do, should be able to do, and have done in the past – say, eat ice cream. You go to your doctor and she does all kinds of tests and discovers that you are lacking an enzyme which is necessary for the digestion of ice cream. She then gives you the good news: your body can produce plenty of this enzyme just by eating mangos. But you dislike mangos; dislike them as much as you like ice cream. So, what do you do? Do you learn to eat mangos (ugh!) or do you give up ice cream (noo!)?
Let’s pose the same type of question, only let’s change the issue from a physical one to a spiritual one. You find yourself unable to do something you want to do and should be able to do: recognize God’s will. You go to your pastor and he runs a variety of soul tests and comes to the conclusion that you’re missing a spiritual enzyme (of sorts) that is necessary for the recognition of God’s will. That spiritual enzyme is loving relationships with other Christ-followers.
What do you do? You are an introvert. You don’t like big groups. It’s not easy for you to be with people. Taking part in a fellowship group or a Bible study is work for you; you think of it with distaste. So, do you learn to have loving relationships with other Christ-followers or do you give up on knowing God’s will?
We have a real problem in society generally and in the church in particular—and it is getting worse. We are a ferociously independent, perilously individualistic people. Ironically, the advent of personal computers and especially mobile devices – supposedly communication devices – has made meaningful relationships with others even more challenging.
A survey a few years ago revealed that millions fewer people were attending church services than they did two decades earlier, yet more people claim to pray daily than they did then. What that means is that people are trying to do the Christian life in isolation, which violates God’s design and cannot be successful.
Like the human body’s digestive system, the Body of Christ’s recognition system for God’s will requires an enzyme of sorts: loving relationships. Humans are interdependent by design. God made us in such a way that we cannot reach our potential without others. It is a paradox, but you cannot fully be yourself by yourself. And you cannot fully perceive and understand God’s will without the aid of other Christians.
In Colossians 1, we have a description of the Apostle Paul’s remarkable prayer for the Colossian Church. I have prayed it for Cal Road and for other churches many times. In it, Paul makes only one request, but it is an important one. He prays the Colossians might be filled with the knowledge (or recognition, as the word could be translated) of God’s will. Paul understood that the recognition of God’s will is vital to the church and to our lives. Let’s read our text, beginning at Colossians 1:9.
“And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God; being strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy; giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” (ESV)
We’ll spend two weeks in this passage, but before we start digging into the details, we need to set the passage in context. When Paul wrote in verse 9, “And so” (NIV, “For this reason”), from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you,” we need to ask, “For what reason?” What had Paul heard about the Colossians that caused him to pray ceaselessly for them? He’d heard (verse 8) about their love in the Spirit. He mentions something similar in verses 3 and 4: “We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints…”
Paul understood what the Colossians’ love for the saints meant: their church had what it takes to recognize God’s will. They had the essential equipment for receiving messages from God.
If I’m on my way to meet you at the coffee shop but you’re trying to call me to let me know you’re running late, I will not get your message if I left my phone at home again. You can call a dozen times, but I won’t hear your voice, because I don’t have a receiver capable of accessing your message. Just so, when a church does not love each other, when they forget or, worse, show contempt for each other, they won’t have a receiver capable of hearing God’s voice, and they will not know his will.
When Paul heard that the Colossians had love for all the saints, he knew they could hear from God and recognize his will. That’s why he began praying for them to “be filled with the knowledge of God’s will,” which he knew was essential to their success. He asked God to convey that knowledge, verse 9, “through all spiritual wisdom and understanding.” If love is the receiver needed to capture the signal, wisdom and understanding are the router and the computer that process it.
Of the two words, “wisdom” is the more general. The wise person grasps God’s ways. He understands God’s values and, as such, has the framework into which God’s specific will for churches and individuals fits. The Bible regards God himself as the source of wisdom, the fear of the Lord as the beginning of wisdom, the Scriptures as a means for gaining wisdom, and humility as the condition for maintaining wisdom.
The word translated as “understanding” could be, and frequently is, translated “insight.” This is the more specific of the two words. It has to do with seeing how the big truths fit into a particular situation. Note that the knowledge of God’s will is delivered through spiritual wisdom and understanding, which is to say, through wisdom and understanding that are sourced in the Holy Spirit. Without the Spirit, we will not have wisdom and understanding; and, without wisdom and understanding, we will not recognize God’s will. And if we don’t recognize God’s will, our walk, both as individuals and as a believing community, will not (v. 10) be worthy of the Lord.
Notice the little big word “all.” The knowledge (or recognition) of God’s will comes to us through all spiritual wisdom and understanding. There is a potential problem here. You have some wisdom and understanding and so do I, but neither of us has all wisdom and understanding. That leaves us in need … of each other, which is how God designed it. He routinely sends the knowledge of his will to multiple people and not just one; to the Church and not just the individual. What’s more, he doesn’t usually send all of it to every person but some to one and some to another. That is why someone who separates from the church cannot expect to know very much of God’s will. And that is why humility is so important in understanding God’s will.
The way email works can serve as an illustration. Let’s say your childhood best friend is going to be in town tomorrow at noon and wants to meet you for lunch, so he sends you an email. He only has an hour, but he’d sure love to see you. When he clicks “send,” his email is broken down into packets of information, each with an IP address, which are sent separately, sometimes along different routes. When the packets arrive, they are reassembled into a meaningful message. (Well, not always, but you get the idea.)
Like email, when God reveals his will, it is often broken down into packets, sent, and then reassembled by a group of loving believers with Spirit-sourced wisdom and understanding. It’s not that God cannot send the knowledge of his will to one person, but frequently he does not. He intends us to relate to, and rely on, each other. If we insist on going it alone, we forfeit much of the wisdom and understanding we need to comprehend what God is doing in and around our lives.
A few years ago, I heard Phil Vischer, the creator of VeggieTales, share his story. Phil was on top of the world, wildly successful and full of big ideas for the future. In fact, he named his production company Big Ideas Productions. Because things were going so well, he concluded that God wanted to grow Big Ideas into a much larger company, so he spent millions of dollars, hired all kinds of staff, and got himself upside down financially. His cash flow couldn’t handle the skyrocketing bills, Big Ideas went bankrupt, and Phil was forced to sell all VeggieTales copyrights to another company. In a short time, his company and his life had fallen apart.
Phil looks back and says, “When things were doing so well, I thought that was God wanting us to expand, so we grew like crazy. Now I think it was more me having all these great ideas in my head and being so excited that I wanted to do them all at once.” He admits that he wasn’t humble. His wisdom wasn’t sourced in God and his word. He was charting a course without counsel and flying solo. That is a recipe for misunderstanding God’s will.
How important is it for you and me and for our church to receive the knowledge of God’s will? Well, how important is it for a military unit to know whether Central Command is ordering them to attack or defend, to advance or retreat? It is vital. Look at verse 10: “…so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him.” There is a reason behind Paul’s prayer: being filled with the knowledge of God’s will is not an end in itself. Such knowledge will help us do two things: live a life worthy of the Lord; and please him in every way.
The word translated “worthy” is derived from a Greek word meaning, “to have the weight of another thing.” The terminology developed around the use of ancient scales. Say you went to the market to buy five pounds of wheat flour. The merchant would place weighing stones on one side of the scale then fill the other side with wheat until the scale balanced or, as they might say, “achieved worthiness.”
Some merchants used inaccurate weighing stones or rigged the scale to their advantage, which is why Proverbs 11:1 says “A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is his delight.”
To walk worthy of the Lord is to go through your day in a way that balances your lifestyle with your calling as a servant of the king and savior of the world. Without the knowledge of God’s will, that is not going to happen. And it can’t happen if we are using inaccurate weights – that is, ones that are calibrated for the non-Christian. If we try to balance our lives using the scale weights everyone else uses – career, house-size, body mass index, social media footprint – we’ll never balance out in a way that is worthy of the Lord.
Instead of using such things to measure ourselves, let’s weight the scale with: Jesus’s trust in, and obedience to, his Father (how do we measure up to that?); his sacrifice for his friends; his love for his enemies. Place on the scale the Lord’s patience, his care for the needy, his openness to strangers. Set our lives against those weights.
We will of course be light in such virtues, but we can at least use the right scale. And we don’t need to worry: God isn’t waiting for us to be just like Jesus in all these things before he’ll be pleased with us. The desire to be like Jesus already pleases him, as does every effort we make toward that end.
That brings us to the second reason Paul prays for these Colossian Christians to be filled with the knowledge of God’s will: so that they can please the Lord in every way. We can please the Lord. The Lord can say of you, “Isn’t he something special!” Or, “I just love her; she’s such a delight.”
We may think it is impossible for someone like us – with all our problems and shortcomings – to please God. We cannot even please people; how on earth can we please God?
If that is what we think, our thinking is precisely backwards. It is impossible to please some people; no matter what we do, they will never be pleased. If you grew up with a mom or dad like that, you know what I mean. But did you know it is also impossible to please ourselves—at least for any length of time? Humans don’t stay pleased.
But it is not impossible to please God. He loves to see his children succeed. He delights in them. He sings over them. He is easy to please – but hard to satisfy. He is delighted by every honest effort his children make, but he always wants more. Not because he is a slave driver but because he knows what we can be and longs for us to experience it. He made us for glory, for perfection, for all joy, and, for our sakes, he will not be satisfied with less.
When our grandson Phinehas was five-years-old, he colored a picture for me and then, in his just-learning-to-make-letters handwriting, signed his name: PHIN (all caps). I was pleased with the picture but even more with the signature. I assume that, when he is older, his handwriting will be firmer, clearer, and flow more easily. I want and expect that for him, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t thoroughly pleased with what he’d done.
So, it is with God. He isn’t hard to please. We, with all our problems and shortcomings, can be a real source of pleasure to God, a joy within the fountain of joy. He even tells us, through the apostle, what pleases him. That is what we’ll see next week, when we will look at four things that bring pleasure to God our Father.
In closing, I remind you that bringing pleasure to God and walking worthy of the Lord Christ happens to people and churches who are filled with the knowledge of his will. And that knowledge comes to us like email: in packets (if you will), which often follow different routes and must be put together. This means you need other people in the church, and they need you. I repeat what was said earlier: You cannot fully be yourself by yourself. And you cannot fully perceive and understand God’s will when you don’t have the kind of relationship with others that God intends.
So, ask God to lead you into healthy relationships with others and to heal those that are unhealthy. Don’t be a loner.
One of my favorite authors, Wendell Berry, was walking with his friend Wes Jackson past a plot of Maximilian Sunflowers, which can grow to nearly ten feet. Jackson pointed to a plant that stood alone, disconnected from the rest.
Wendell Berry saw that this plant was taller than most and had bigger flowers. But it wasn’t healthy. Its blossoms were so heavy that the branches were starting to break under their weight. In one sense, the plant had “succeeded”: it was unusually tall and its flowers were impressive. It stood out from the crowd. But Maximilian Sunflowers can only thrive in community, not in isolation.
That’s true of people too, especially of the followers of Jesus. Take steps to enter into the life of the church. Be involved with Jesus’s people. Find a ministry to be involved in. Join us on Thursdays at 4:30 for the next 9 weeks to pray for our church. Come to next week’s church family picnic. Don’t stand alone.
Blessing/Sending (Hebrews 12): In view of God’s mercy, offer yourselves as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. Do not be conformed to this world, but rather, be transformed by the renewal of your mind. Then you will be able to discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God. If that is what we think, our thinking is precisely backwards.
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