Col No.14 Applying the Lordship of Christ

The epistle of Paul to the Colossians, and we're going to read a few verses together from the first chapter—glad you agree—from the first chapter and the twelfth verse, and we'll all read the scripture together, and we will conclude at the twentieth verse. Colossians 1, verse 12 to 20, inclusive. Giving thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light, who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son, in whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins, who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature.

For by him were all things created that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created by him and for him. And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.

And he is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things he might have the preeminence. For it pleads the Father that in him should all fullness dwell. And having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself.

By him, I say, whether they be things in earth or things in heaven. And you that were sometimes alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath he reconciled. Now I'd be grateful if you'd have your Bibles open at Colossians chapter 2. And I'm reading the sixth and seventh verses.

And if you haven't a New Testament, I'm sure someone alongside you will let you look on at theirs. Or indeed, you'll find these two verses typed out on our weekly bulletin. Let me read the verses, but again make reference to the one I referred to on my own in our earlier reading from the first chapter.

And you that were sometimes alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath God reconciled. As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, or as Lord, so walk ye in him, rooted and built up in him, and established in the faith as ye have been taught, abounding therein with thanksgiving. In our consecutive studies from this epistle, I want this morning God helping me to address you on applying the Lordship of Jesus.

Applying the Lordship of Jesus, working it all out in terms of day by day experience. If you were to ask certain people what a Christian is, you would get a variety of answers. If you were to come with me to the continent of India and say, who is a Christian? Then many of the Indians would say, well, a European is a Christian, and an Indian is a Hindu, or possibly a Muslim.

If you turn the clock back to the days of the British Empire when the sun never set upon our colonies, then the average person in the British held territories would say an Englishman is a Christian. If you can envisage a situation back in the school where I used to teach in the staff room, on one occasion I remember the senior maths master engaged in a conversation on the telephone with someone in another school. And my colleague was getting extremely irate at the behaviour and the response that he was getting to certain suggestions he was making.

And in the midst of his frustration, I well remember overhearing him say to the fellow on the other end, let's have a little bit of Christianity about us. And really there he was appealing to some ethical code which he wrongly associated as being directly and entirely an expression of Christianity. What is a Christian? Well, listen to Paul writing to the church at Rome.

And in the 10th chapter, the 9th verse, he says, if you shall confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God hath raised him from the dead, you will be saved. That makes you a Christian. Or listen to a similar sort of statement in 1 Corinthians 12 and the 3rd verse.

Wherefore, I give you to understand that no man speaking by the Spirit of God calleth Jesus accursed, and that no man can say that Jesus is the Lord but by the Holy Ghost. A Christian, when all these other inadequate definitions are thrust on one side, is someone who acknowledges that Jesus is Lord. But that's more than just a mere expression, a mouthing of that statement.

You might quite easily say this morning, all right, Jesus is Lord. I'm a Christian, that's what you said. No, it goes beyond that.

And this is what I want to seek to show you as we work out what Paul is saying here in the 6th and 7th verses of this epistle. And he's referring to people who have received Christ Jesus as Lord. But before we come to these verses, let me give you another illustration, just in case you're not clear at the moment.

Let's assume that we're going back two or three centuries and that we're in the presence of Nelson. He's come into our congregation and we've all recognized him. Lord of the Admiralty, the great sea warrior of these British islands of ours.

And we might, as ordinary peoples, having noticed who he is, politely expressed our greetings. But let's suggest that amongst the congregation there were a group of sailors, and they spot Nelson. They will recognize more than in just a polite fashion who he is and what his authority embraces.

We as civilians would realize that Nelson was a great man, but perhaps it would stop there. But the sailors in the service over which Nelson had authority would be overawed, overwhelmed. And there might also be coupled a feeling of pride and tremendous respect.

He is their Lord, the Lord of the Admiralty, the greatest captain, the greatest sea warrior of that particular generation. Now you see, this is the fundamental distinction between those who just say Jesus is Lord and are mouthing expressions that are no more than a mere articulation of a sentence. And those who from the depths of their being are saying yes, Jesus is Lord, he's my Lord.

A Christian is a person who's no longer a civilian, so to speak, but is actually in the service, recognizing that Jesus is captain, that Jesus is supreme, that Jesus is the one who has authority over them and over their destiny. So, coming back to these two verses, here is the aged Apostle Paul, the writer of this epistle. He's in prison, and the furrows sometimes are across his face as he thinks about certain Christian communities that are filling him with despondency, because he's worried as to whether they'll remain true to the faith.

And then his mind alights on the Colossians. He hasn't met them, but he knows all about them. And instead of the furrows, they melt, and his mouth expresses joy and happiness.

And the member of the Praetorian Guard who's alongside Paul, who is looking after him, under whose responsibility Paul comes, he notices that his prisoner at the moment has changed in his disposition completely. He's thinking, verse 5, of a group of Christians over who he joys and is happy. And why is he happy about these people? Verse 6 tells us, because there is something distinctive about them.

They have received Christ Jesus as Lord. And so he goes on as he writes his letter to them, to encourage them to even greater degrees of Christian discipleship. This text then splits open, or this passage of Scripture, easily, naturally, into three parts.

And the first thing that we alight our attention upon is this, that the verses are written to a specific class of people who practiced a different way of life from ordinary folks, and whose disposition was marked by something that is singularly important. Listen again as I go through the way this text just opens out in front of us, and let's concentrate on the first part. It's addressed to a specific class of people.

Those who have received Jesus the Lord. Those who have heard of Jesus as Lord. These are people, according to verse 7, who have been taught the Christian faith.

And according to verse 6, have received the Christian faith. And my friend, there is all the difference in the world between being taught about Jesus and receiving Jesus. What have they been taught by their pastor, Epaphras? Well, they had been taught that the man who came from Galilee, the carpenter, the artisan, who has such a winsome way with people when he was speaking, is to be understood as the Christ.

That word Christ would have been recognized by Jewish ears to refer to Old Testament prophecy. For in the dusty pages of the first part of our Bible, there are predictions that one day God would send into the world someone who would fulfill all his promises and do for humankind what none other has been able to achieve. And Epaphras has taught these people that the carpenter is none other than the Christ, the fulfiller of Old Testament prophecy.

And what's more, they have heard from their pastor that besides being called Christ, he is also named Jesus. Jesus was not only the name which he possessed, it described the role that he performed. For they were taught that Jesus means Savior, and he lived up to his name.

And the reason why he was pinned to a Roman cross and hung there on Calvary's hill was so that people who had violated, who'd broken God's law, might enter into a new relationship with God, having had sins forgiven. So they were taught that the carpenter was the Christ. They were taught that the carpenter was Jesus in more than just name.

And what's more, they had been taught that the artisan from Galilee was to be called the Lord. The word Lord, as I sought to show you some Sunday mornings ago, is one of the, indeed the greatest name that can ever be applied in scriptural context to anybody. Philippians tells us that when Jesus was raised from the dead, God the Father gave him the name which is above every name.

He identified him in heaven, and amongst all sensitive people on earth, as being the Lord, the Lord God of the universe. You remember I preached an address from those verses that we read earlier, which speak of Jesus Christ as being the supreme one, the chief, the Lord of the cosmos, the Lord of the planets, the Lord of this earth, the Lord who has all authority, and before whose knees, or rather before whose feet, one day every knee shall bow, and all shall confess who he is. And this is what these people in Colossae had been taught, that Jesus was a fulfiller of Old Testament predictions, the Christ.

Jesus lived up to his name, he was the Savior, and Jesus is the one who was responsible not only for salvation, but originally for the creation of the heavens and the earth. Now there's one thing in being taught that, and getting your theology right, but it's an entirely different thing to receive this. One thing to acknowledge who Nelson is, and another thing, as far as a sailor is concerned, to appreciate that he is my commander, he is my captain, he is in charge of the British Navy.

And this is the fundamental distinction, my dear friend, between people in this country, by and large, the majority, and you may be surprised at this, but I believe it to be the case, the majority, in some way, believe in Jesus. He is the Savior. So our churches on Easter Sunday are thronged with people, far more people in church than ever go to football matches on a Saturday, even the aggregate number in this football-loving country of England, and will include Scotland and Wales, and Ireland for that matter.

People, generally speaking, are prepared to accept, they're prepared to be taught that Jesus is Christ, that He is the Savior, and that He is the Lord. But it's such an academic thing, you see, it's away from them, it's not part of their personality. But this is the distinction, the Christian is someone who not only has been taught about Jesus, but has received Him.

To as many as received Him, says the Scriptures, to them gave He the power to become the sons of God. It is possible to entertain Jesus in the power of His Holy Spirit in your heart. So the writer of the book of Revelation, speaking for Jesus, says, Behold, I stand at the door and knock.

If any man will open the door, I will come in and with him and he with me. In that sense, I can entertain Jesus. And this is the difference between the academic Christian, in quotes, so to speak, and the true believer.

The one may have been taught, but the other has received the Christ and pledged their life's obedience to Jesus. And I acknowledge that He died on the cross of Calvary to save them from their sins. Now here's the apostle Paul, and I tell you that the furrows have been erased from his brow, because he's thinking of the Colossians.

He's thinking of people there in that Greek city who've not only just been well taught in theology by their pastor, but they've received Christ. These words are written to a specific class of people. And this class of people follow through Paul's argument.

They practice a different way of life. What sort of life does a person demonstrate who has received Jesus as Lord? Well, Paul has a bunch of metaphors which are really mixed here, and I'm glad about this, because there are those who are so pedantic about grammatical structure and expression of language when one is preaching, that you would think that that was the thing that mattered most of all, but not the apostle Paul. Now and again he breaks every rule that there is in Greek grammar when the Spirit falls upon him, and he'll mix his metaphors.

And so he says, these people who've received Jesus as Lord, listen, this is what they do. They walk in Him. They're rooted in Him.

They're built up in Him. They're established in Him. Walking, rooting, building.

Three different words which convey different things, and yet Paul brings them all together to underline the type of life of a person who's accepted Jesus as Lord. They walk in Him. Let's think about that for a moment.

Actually, you can't convey that literally into English comprehension like you can in the Greek. So the NIV is dead right when it talks about people who live in Jesus. You say, but how do I live in Jesus? Well, I live in Jesus in as much as I've opened my heart to Him.

I live, says the apostle Paul, yet not I, but Christ lives in me. You see, this business of Christianity just being something to do with a mind is completely unbiblical. It transcends the mind.

It goes through the mind, but it affects the heart. And the Christian is a person who has received the Spirit in their life. So I walk by Jesus.

I live in Jesus in as much as my life is controlled by Him. That's what makes me a Christian, walking in Him, rooting, being rooted in the Lord. Possibly the apostle Paul had in mind Psalm 1 where it talks about the good man in terms of the tree whose roots go into the rivers of life.

And that's a tremendous description of what happens to a Christian. You see, the root of his life, it goes not into the subsoil of human carnal desires, but rather it goes into the very life of Jesus. I don't know if I dare risk an agricultural illustration because I know so very little about this, but I believe that you can graft, Mr. Ranger will correct me afterwards, you can graft some part of an apple tree, a branch of a tree onto a different tree.

And by that miracle of nature, the branch that's being grafted on can draw life from the original tree. So with the Lord Jesus Christ, Christians are people who have been grafted onto Him. Their roots go down into the Lord Jesus.

They draw their life from Him. And that's why they spend time in prayer and reading the Bible. A person who never engages in prayer, a person who never reads God's word is indicating that they have no life that they're receiving from this soil at all.

You can't be alive spiritually without recourse to these, what the theologians call the means of grace. The exposition of scripture coming around the Lord's table. All this gives spiritual nourishment to the soul.

And the Christian is a person who, having received Christ, walks where Jesus walks, roots himself into the Savior. That's a past tense. The next one, the next, the third metaphor is a present tense.

The Christian is rooted in Jesus, and then he's being constantly built up in Jesus. Now we've moved from the realm of agriculture, and we're on a building site. The foundations have gone down, and on those foundations are to be built a superstructure, one story after another.

The Christian constantly being built up in the faith so that, and listen to this you older folks, for this is a tremendous challenge. The older you get, the taller you become. This verse is arguing for skyscrapers, spiritual skyscrapers.

People who are being built, and built, and built up in the faith. Not a jury building that's bypassed its foundation, but something that is built on a firm platform. Even Jesus Christ, the foundation of our faith.

Now you see, when people live or walk in Jesus, when they're rooted in him, when they're constantly being built up in him, that means to say that they're established in life. They can cope, and they're singularly different from anybody else. And the difference should be obvious, at least to those who are close by.

You see, this special category of people who have received Jesus can confront some situations in life which cause others just to crumble. You say, what do you mean? Well, take the Christian who considers the problem of death. You've been with your life's partner for 30, 40 years, and maybe yours has been a very happy and blessed marriage, and praise God for that's fast becoming the exception rather than the rule.

And then suddenly, just like that, the horror strikes, the one is taken. What happens then? Well, this is where the person who has received Jesus as Lord begins to find, as they have found throughout their lives, but now even more particularly, the value of the Christian faith. That's why I'm calling this address, Applying Jesus as Lord.

I can cope with bereavement. I can cope with the tragedy of my partner being moved from me because I know that death has no final sting. The grave has no triumph.

Rather, ultimately, I shall go through death myself to be with my loved one in the heavenly dimension. And until that moment, I will still be established in the faith because my roots have gone through to Jesus. My foundation is in Christ.

I have a faith that will be able to withstand all the blows that life will bring. Here is a man, and he's been healthy for 40-odd years, and suddenly he is smitten with multiple sclerosis. What does he do? As a Christian, how does he react? He seeks the Lord for healing, but no answers seem to come to his prayers.

Does he then just deteriorate spiritually? No. This is the test, and this is the glory of the gospel. The sclerosis can't affect the roots that he has in Christ Jesus.

It cannot become some devastating piece of equipment that goes up towards the building of his spiritual life and crushes it and smashes it down. He's built up in Christ, you see. He's applying the lordship of Jesus.

And when you have those blessings, there is no experience on this earth that can cripple you of your faith. This I believe from the depths of my being. So the apostle, who himself is a perfect example of all that he's here arguing, talks about being rooted and built up in Christ.

You think of the writer's lot. He's in some Roman jail. Maybe it's a smelly dungeon.

Maybe it's rat infested. There wouldn't be the sanitary facilities that you and I just take for granted. He doesn't know whether he's going to be killed or let free or what is going to be the nature of his sentence.

But do you find within the apostle Paul anything that suggests his faith is threatened? No. Rather you discover him in this incarcerated condition, in this prison, still praying for Christian brothers and sisters, still joying, rejoicing at the fact that there are those who are going on to be good soldiers of Jesus Christ. And so he pens this letter to a group of particular people who have received Jesus as Lord.

And he says, you fellows there, you sisters there, having received the Lord, so walk in him, so be rooted in him, so be built up and established in the faith as you have been taught. And finally, and on this we can use an economy of words, he spells out their particular disposition, abounding therein with thanksgiving. The apostle Paul was intoxicated with joy.

I don't believe that that's an exaggerated statement. Perish the thought that's crept into the modern thinking of men and women that religion has been designed to make us miserable. I know that this is a hobby horse that I often ride from this pulpit, but so often people will come to me in my vestry or in conversation during the week, and they will talk of Christianity in terms of something that has been devised by a killjoy God to rob us of happiness.

Whereas the reverse is the case. The apostle speaks not only of thanksgiving, but abounding with thanksgiving. So often he uses that word abounding.

In Romans, he talks about the abounding grace of Jesus. In Philippians, he talks about the abounding love of the Lord Jesus. Twelve times in the second letter to the Corinthians, he uses the word abounding.

And now when he's writing to the Colossian Christians, he says, you who've received Jesus as Lord, my, from within your disposition, there's a joy that overflows. It cascades. It must, because you realize who Jesus is and what he has done.

You say, but this argument is just a torrent of words that are pouring out of your lips at the moment. You don't really mean that this can be the case for every average Christian, do you? Yes, I do. On this basis, that those who have received Christ as Lord are constantly contemplating what he has done for their soul.

What Jesus has done for this soul of mine, the half has never been told. When I survey the wondrous cross on which the Prince of Glory died, my richest gains I count but loss and poor content on all my pride. That's one aspect of surveying the work of Jesus.

It enables us to get things that we thought had importance into their own perspective. And we move from the secular and the material to the spiritual and the eternal. And we rejoice in the Lord for what he has done for us.

And when I think that God, his Son not sparing, sent him to die, I scarce can take it in, that on the cross, my sin he gladly bearing, he bled and died to take away my sin. Then sings my soul, my Savior God to thee, how great thou art, how great thou art. And whether I'm in my bed of sickness, whether I'm coping with bereavement, whether I'm incarcerated in some dungeon, the greatness of the Lordship of Jesus can never be taken from me.

And within my circumstances, there comes bubbling up a joy and a jubilation, an abounding thanksgiving to a God who has done all things well for me. These verses were written to a specific class of people who developed their own unique lifestyle and had their own disposition of happiness. And these verses belong not only to the Colossians of yesteryear, but the Christians of today who too have not only been taught, but have received Jesus as Lord.

Amen. And Father, for the greatness of our God and the perfection of his salvation, we thank you. Help us not only to have been taught about Jesus.

May we receive him increasingly in all his fullness. May we grow up to be spiritual skyscrapers, our foundation being strong on the Savior for his sake. Amen.