Col No.39 In Conclusion

Paul, Prisoner, for the sake of Jesus Christ and Brother Timothy, to Philemon, our much-loved fellow worker, Afir, our sister and Archippus, who is with us in the fight, to the church that meets in your house, grace and peace be to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. I always thank God for you, Philemon, in my constant prayers for you all, for I have heard how you love and trust both the Lord Jesus himself and those who believe in him. I pray that those who share your faith may also share your knowledge of all the good things that believing in Jesus Christ can mean to us.

It is your love, my brother, that gives us such comfort and happiness, for it cheers the hearts of your fellow Christians. And although I could rely on my authority in Christ and dare to order you to do what I consider right, I am not doing that, no. I am appealing to that love of yours, a simple personal appeal from Paul the old man in prison for Jesus Christ's sake.

I am appealing for my child, yes? I have become a father, though I have been under lock and key, and the child's name is Onesimus. Oh, I know you have found him pretty useless in the past, but he is going to be useful now to both of us. I am sending him back to you.

Will you receive him as my son, part of me? I should have dearly loved to have kept him with me. He could have done what you would have done. My brother looked after me here in prison for the gospel's sake, but I would do nothing without consulting you first, for if you have a favour to give me, let it be spontaneous and not forced from you by circumstances.

It occurs to me that there has been a purpose in your losing him. You lost him, a slave, for a time, but now you are having him back for good, not merely a slave but as a brother Christian. He is already especially loved by me.

How much more will you be able to love him, both as a man and as a fellow Christian? You and I have so much in common, haven't we? Then do welcome him as you would welcome me. If you feel he has wronged or cheated you, put it down to my account. I have written this with my own hand.

I, Paul, hereby promise to repay you. Of course, I am not stressing the fact that you might be said to owe me your very soul. Now do grant me this favour, my brother.

Such an act of love will do my old heart good. As I send you this letter, I know you will do what I ask. I believe, in fact, you will do more.

Will you do something else? Get the guest room ready for me, for I have great hopes that through your prayers I myself will be returned to you as well. Epaphras, here in prison with me, sends his greetings, so do Mark, Aristarchus, Demas, and Luke, all fellow workers for God. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit.

Amen. Paul. If you don't have a Bible with you, I'd be glad if the person sitting alongside would share theirs, assuming they've got one.

As we read the final verses of Paul's letter to the Colossians, Paul's letter to the church at Colossae, and the 15th verse to the end. Salute the brethren which are in Laodicea, and Nymphos, and the church which is in his house. And when this epistle is read among you, cause that it be read also in the church of the Laodiceans, and that ye likewise read the epistle from Laodicea, and say to Archippus, take heed to the ministry which thou hast received in the Lord that thou fulfil it.

The salutation, by the hand of me, Paul, remember my bonds, grace be with you, amen. I never thought at the commencement of this series of studies from Paul's letter to the Colossians that we would span some 39 or so weeks as we sifted together the contents of this epistle. But I believe that this lengthy period has been justified, and those who meet regularly here in the tabernacle have, by the controlling aspect of the Word of God, been brought face to face with some truths that perhaps, if I had just been picking texts at random to preach on on a Sunday morning, would never have been shared with you.

That's one of the reasons for a disciplined study of the Word of God in a systematic basis. And we have found, as we've gone through this particular letter, how the church at Colossae, some 2,000 years or just less than that ago, was confronted by some great problems. There were the equivalent to the modern sects coming along with their teaching, denying the deity of Christ.

So Paul, writing this letter to the church, to the Christians at Colossae, not wanting them to be troubled by this heresy, spells out the fact of the glory of Jesus, who is the second person of the ever-blessed Trinity. And in the first chapter, he tells us how all the fullness of God bodily is within Jesus Christ. And he goes on, having told us this in the opening verses of the first chapter, to refer to the fact of the cross and the value of Jesus dying there.

Because verse 19 of chapter 1, Paul says, the fullness of the Father dwelt in Jesus. Therefore, when Jesus, verse 20, died on the cross of Calvary, he made it possible to reconcile to himself all people who were sinners. So Paul, in this first chapter, spells out the supreme value of the death of the Lord Jesus Christ.

For him, there is only the cross in which he will glory. Salvation comes, my friend, through faith in the finished work of Jesus, as it was in the day of Paul, writing to the Colossians. So it is today.

There is no other way of salvation at all. Good works are profitable, but they will not produce the saving of the soul. Keeping religious observances, those too, says the apostle when he's writing in the second chapter about the right of circumcision, those too will not create salvation.

There is only one way by which a man can be saved, and that is by trusting Jesus as the Son of God and believing that he died on the Roman gibbet to save, to release, you and me from the penalties of our sins. Now, says the apostle, if you remember his argument that I've been sharing with you for these last months, that itself is now a theoretical thing. If you belong to Jesus Christ, then it's going to make a tremendous difference in your lifestyle in the way that you conduct yourself day by day.

So in the last two chapters of this epistle, having dealt with the theology of who Jesus is and the effect of his death on the cross, now Paul, in these verses, tells Christians how they ought to live. One with the other, the love that should pervade the Christian community, all this is very carefully spelt out by Paul. How they should exist in family relationships, husband with wives, parents with children, employers with employees, and so on.

All this comes into a practical application of Christianity. And Paul takes more than the third chapter, he spills over into the fourth chapter to take these things and to apply them to the way that we live if we claim to be Christians. And then, you remember, how towards the end of this valuable epistle, Paul refers to those who were with him at Rome.

Paul never was a one-man band. He couldn't contain himself. He could not himself dispense all the responsibilities of proclaiming the gospel.

He needed other brothers. And that was the sum total of my address this past week. When you remember, I suggested to you that in the verses preceding the ones that we're going to look at in a moment or so, Paul introduced his team.

Praise God for brothers and sisters who get alongside preachers and help them in the ministry. Paul was not solo in Rome. He was not isolated on his own.

He got other men, Onesimus, Aristarchus, Epaphras, and so forth, who were alongside him, complementing his ministry and ensuring him of success as he witnessed for Jesus. Even in the rather strange circumstances, as I shall show you, in which he existed. Well then, that's compressed into five minutes, what has taken me 39 weeks to tell you.

But let's conclude our little series as we come to these final verses. Now, when you're writing a letter, I was writing one to my mum yesterday, what do you do towards the end? Well, it gets a little bit disjointed as you just throw in a piece of information that you forgot to say in the first paragraph, or you ask how one aunt is, or one uncle is, or so on, something like that. Sometimes at the end of the letter, things are a little bit unconnected with what have gone before.

And so it is here, with the Apostle, I'm not saying there's no connection, but there are certain things that he refers to in the 15th through to the 18th verses, which at first reading, at any rate, seem to be a little disjointed. What does he say? Well, in the 15th verse, he makes reference to house churches. In the 16th verse, I'll run through all of these verses so we can lift out the main topic.

In the 16th verse, he refers to circular letters, letters that have been written and have been distributed. In the 17th verse, he makes reference to someone who's exercising a rather timid ministry. And in the 18th, he refers to his own situation at Rome.

These four little things he locks into the final few sentences of this mighty epistle. House churches, look at the 15th verse. Salute the brethren which are in Laodicea, and Nymphos, and the church which is in his house.

Laodicea was about ten miles away from Colossae. And there the Christian community gathered together, Lord's Day by Lord's Day, and perhaps on other occasions too, in the household of a reasonably wealthy Christian by the name of Nymphos. We get so used to churches here, particularly in Worthing.

We've got about 44 at last count, that we seem to think that always Christianity in the Eastern world and in the Western world as it spilt over from the Middle East into Europe was studded with great cathedrals and beautiful churches like this. Whereas, you know, when you really start and consider, this wasn't the case. The early Christians had got nowhere to go.

In Jerusalem, well, they used to, in the beginning, go to the temple, and there they would meet. But later on, this got to be a bit of a problem because the authorities were a little upset about what they were doing, and the prayer meetings that they were having, and when things sometimes got very exciting as the power of the Spirit of God fell upon them. And so, in the Acts of the Apostles, by the time you get to the twelfth chapter and the twelfth verse, you've got John Mark's mother opening up her house.

I wonder if you noticed that. She opens up her house, and the prayer meetings of the early church, they used to be there in her house. The church at Jerusalem would gather in the place where John Mark's mother lived.

And then, when you move further on into the Acts of the Apostles, in the sixteenth chapter, there's Paul at Philippi, and there's a woman. She's a wealthy woman. She's sensitive to the gospel.

She wants to know more about Jesus, and she responds to what Paul has to say about the reason why Jesus came on earth. And Lydia, having become a Christian, says, Paul, why don't you use my home? And so, she opens up her home, and the Philippian converts, they come and they congregate there, and reference is twice made in that chapter to the use of Lydia's home. And then, when you come to the last chapter of the book that Paul addresses to the Romans, he makes reference in the second verse of the sixteenth chapter to Aquila and Priscilla, rich Christians who, in Rome, opened up their house.

And the Christians would come along there, and the church would meet that called-out community. Those people who belonged to Jesus Christ, they would meet for worship in the home of these two well-to-do Christians. Now, at Colossae, it was pretty similar.

You'll not find that from the Colossian epistle, but you will find from Philemon, the letter that I read to you earlier on, that Philemon was a wealthy Christian in Colossae, and in the second verse of the epistle that Paul writes to him, reference is made to the church that meets in his home. So there you are. I've only given you three or four examples.

I could have given you many more, which indicate that in the early days, Christian people used to gather together in the homes of wealthy believers, and there they would worship the living God. So you come across in the New Testament the concept of the church in the house. That doesn't mean to say that it's wrong to meet in such buildings as these.

Obviously not, because the Christians would have used, as I told you, the temple at Jerusalem. When Paul first started preaching in some new area, he'd go into the synagogue. He wasn't averse sometimes to booking rooms in the center of a Greek city, and they're preaching the gospel.

But by and large, in the beginning of the Christian church in particular, it was a good thing to use the homes of Christian people for churches, for gathering together, and to worship the Lord. And I think that that's a lovely teaching just to lift out and to apply to ourselves today. Why do I say this? Well, you remember the apostle before had been talking about a Christian home, had he not? Talking about the wife and the husband, how they should live together, and how a Christian home should be conducted in the attitude of the parents towards the children and the children towards the parents.

Because you see, the Christian home, in one very real sense, is part of the church. Here in the tabernacle, we have a couple of hundred families at least. And those families are part of our church fellowship.

They're part of the body of Christ. And I think it's a delightful thing in the evolution of our church structure that we're using more and more the homes of people for sort of satellite meetings in which we gather together to worship the living God, to teach one another from scripture, to share experiences. This it seems to me is directly in accord with what Paul is here referring to in passing as he praises God for Nymphos and for the church that meets in his house at a place called Laodicea.

But not only does Paul mention house churches in the 16th verse, he refers to circular letters. Now if you have an office, you work in an office, work in a school, you must know times when the whole staff has a circular letter from the headmaster or from the managing director and you all eagerly listen or read what he has to say. Where does this idea spring from? It's not a child of the 20th century.

The apostle used to write letters to people and letters to church communities. Again with the passing of time and because we were born in the 20th century, we've almost conned ourselves into thinking that the New Testament has always existed as one book. The second part, the second third of the book that we call the Bible.

Of course this wasn't the case. It took some 300 years before all the books were gathered together and they used to circulate independently. And these epistles of Paul, as that word epistle really indicates, were letters.

Letters that he wrote. Now Paul on occasions would write to an individual like Philemon because Philemon's slave Onesimus had run away and Paul had met him in Rome and he'd led him to the Lord so Paul takes out his pen. Or rather as often Paul did, he used his secretary and he dictated a letter and he sent it to Philemon.

On another occasion he sent letters to a young pastor, a young man that he'd led to the Lord and commissioned in the ministry by the name of Timothy. And then the Colossian Christians, who probably had never met Paul themselves, they wanted some theological questions answering. They got some difficulties.

So they had their pastor, a man whose name was Epaphras, who we came across in the seventh verse of the first chapter and also in this final chapter of this epistle. They got their pastor to go to Rome. They gave him two or three months leave and they said, go and ask Paul, go and tell Paul about the problems that we've got theologically with these heretical teachers.

So Epaphras goes to Rome and in the first chapter and the seventh verse we read how he tells Paul all about the Colossians. Paul's so glad to have knowledge of their spiritual situation but he wants them to learn from him and so he gets a secretary. Maybe one of these men whose names are mentioned here.

Perhaps it was Tychicus and he gets Tychicus to write down his letter, which is eventually sent by hand, probably with Tychicus himself, to Colossae. And they read what Paul has had to say. Now, not only did Paul write to these people in Colossae, but 10 miles away, like say Walburton is to Worthing, there was another church, the church at Laodicea.

Laodicea was a much larger place. My analogy falls down. It was a much larger place than Colossae and Paul had written a letter or so it would seem to the church of the Laodiceans.

Now what was this letter? It was a very interesting letter, a most important letter. That's why Paul says, I want you to get hold of that letter and to read it also in your assembly in the church that meets in the house of Philemon. What was that letter? Well, there's not time for me to make one or two suggestions, but rather to bring my own conclusion and to share it with you.

I believe that that letter was a letter that Paul originally wrote to a church that is called the Ephesians. You might know that that letter itself didn't have the word Ephesus in the first or second verse in the earlier manuscripts. It was attached and it would have seemed that that letter was really a circular sent to all the churches in that part of the world and Paul wanted it to be distributed.

He wanted it to be sent round. And so Paul makes reference to these letters and he says, when you get this one, read it in your assembly and then do a swap, sort of exchange and mart with these letters. You take the one from Laodicea and in turn you let them have the one that I sent to you.

And they began to preserve these letters. Perhaps they had these letters copied. Peter in his epistle, the second epistle in the last chapter, makes reference to the letters of Paul that are circulating by this time.

And ere long, what had happened, my friend, and this just shows how biblical we are in our tradition here in the tabernacle, ere long people would gather together and hear these letters explained or expounded. And one of the great ministries of the pastors and the elders of those early assemblies of Christians was to teach what the apostles like Peter and Paul were teaching. How did they know? Well, they knew because of these letters which were circulating.

So Paul makes reference in these verses, not only to the house church, which he greets in the 15th verse, but he also refers to the epistles, these letters which are already circulating and he advises that they are to be read, their context explained, and applied to the local situation. So, you see, by going through the letter to the Colossians, I've been doing something that's very biblical. We have continued the biblical tradition down the centuries of looking into God's Word and applying its teaching to our hearts.

But let's move on and that quickly, because in the 17th verse, he makes reference to a man with a rather peculiar name. He's called Archippus. And Archippus, it would seem from the letter that Paul writes to Philemon, was none other than the son of Philemon and his wife Athia.

That being the case, he was probably a young man, maybe just in his thirties. And he had been appointed, or so it would seem, as interim pastor in Colossae. You see, Epaphras have gone away, he's in Rome, the church have got no one to lead them, so appointed on a temporary basis is Archippus.

Well, what does a young man feel like when he first comes and pastors a church? I could tell you that from personal experience, actually, going back ten years, when I first, in a very trembling fashion, entered into this pulpit. He feels fearful, he feels nervous, obviously so. So Paul writes to Archippus at the end of this letter, and he says something that's very similar to a directive he gives to Timothy in a letter that he writes to Timothy.

Take heed to the ministry which you've received from the Lord, fulfill it. Here you are, Archippus, and you've got the privilege of ministering to your mother and your father. And some of the people who gather in the church in their home, they're older than you.

Don't feel so timid, don't feel so reticent. This gospel that you're preaching, it's the gospel of the blessed God. He has entrusted it to you.

This is not some philosophical argument in which you're engaging. This is something that God has entrusted you with. Therefore, take heed to the ministry which you have received from the Lord, and fulfill it.

Preach it. Preach it with all your might. Forget the tenderness of your years, and realize that the responsibility has been given you by God, who will enable you to discharge your ministry in an honorable fashion.

So Paul, who'd known Timerity himself as a preacher, who'd sometimes trembled, who sometimes felt that he couldn't express his words well enough. Isn't it strange that Paul makes that confession as he writes to the Corinthians? Paul appreciates the dilemma of a young man in the ministry, and as he's writing this letter to the church at Colossae, he thinks, ah yes, Archippus, he's there, he's taken the position of Epaphus for a while, and I hear that he's so fearful. So here's a reminder, Archippus, that what you're doing, you're doing in the name of the Lord God.

Take heed to the ministry which thou hast received of the Lord, and fulfill it. Preach what is upon your heart, realizing that you have the authority of God behind you. So in these last few sentences that Paul has got left, he refers, when concluding this letter, to the house church in nearby Laodicea, he refers to the circular epistles and the value of the churches exchanging them and reading them, and then he gives a word of encouragement to his young friend, Archippus.

And then, finally, he alludes to personal circumstances. It's rather interesting to see what Paul does right now. Remember, and it's so easy to forget this when you've been studying Colossians, that this man is in jail, and jails in those days could be pretty fearful places.

It's hard, isn't it, to realize that Paul was in jail, because when he writes this letter, there's very little indication of it. He's full of praise. But you see, he's learned in whatsoever state he is, therewith to be content.

I find that easier to preach than to practice. And never once does Paul ask, as he's writing this letter, that the Colossians should pray for him to be released, or for his own personal circumstances to be improved. Rather, he asks them on the limited number of occasions he makes personal reference to to pray that he might have a greater entrance into the hearts of men and women with the gospel of Christ.

So, here's Paul, when he writes a letter to Philemon, just having finished this one, the Colossians, he refers to himself as the aged, Paul the aged, Paul the pensioner who never drew a pension, Paul who's being looked after in one of Caesar's less luxurious hotels there in Rome. He writes to his children, to his beloved Colossians. And at this stage, he says to Tychicus, you can have a rest.

Give me the pen. Give me the scribe. And so he starts to write with his own hand.

The salutation of me, Paul, by my hand. Interesting that he did this on many an occasion, as I could show you if there was more time. Second Thessalonians 3.17 gives indication of this.

He did this to authorize some of the letters that he had dictated. You see, there were those who were perhaps passing letters off as though they came from Paul, but they didn't. So, Paul says, when he's writing to the Thessalonians, that every valid letter, every real authoritative letter that circulates in his name should have his signature on it.

Because even if he doesn't write the whole letter himself, he will always conclude with a personal greeting and with his own name. Now, perhaps one of the reasons why Paul didn't write all the letters himself was, one, because of time. And secondly, because I am inclined to the opinion that Paul often suffered sickness.

I was sharing this with you last week. I'm not preaching this authoritatively, I'm suggesting this to you, it's speculation, but there's some justification for my own conclusions. And also it would seem that he had problems with his eyes when he's writing to the Galatians.

When he finishes that letter, he says, look with what large letters I'm writing to you. As though they're in the dim lit cell, and with his eyesight being somewhat feeble, he has to write in capital letters and his handwriting just doesn't seem to match up with that of his stenographer, that of his secretary. And so he gets the scribe on this occasion from Tychicus, and he says, the salutation by the hand of me Paul.

And if he had difficulty in writing, it's now increased, because as he moves his hand to its extreme, he suddenly finds that the chain which binds him to the Roman soldier is preventing the flow of writing. And so right at the end, he says, remember my bonds. Almost the only indication Paul gives in the letter of his personal discomfiture is right at the end, and he gets it into, at least in the English three, in the original, I would imagine two words.

Remember my chains. Remember the circumstances in which I find myself. Remember me.

And as I pray for you, so will you pray for me. And then, having completed his sole request for them to remember him, he concludes the letter with the same words almost as which he commenced it, grace be with you, Paul. Amen.

And then, in the Old Testament, there's a little proverb which says that of the making of books, there is no end, and my library will be an illustration of that. But my friend, just give me two minutes to say this. There are some books in life which stand out over and against any other volume.

And there's one that's right at the pinnacle, and there's nothing else that can touch it within miles. And that is the book that we call the Bible. And within the book we call the Bible, there are these letters that Paul wrote.

And they were written with a purpose. They were written so that people who would take trouble to read them might understand the way of salvation. Now you may only have heard this last address of the 39 I've preached on this book.

But take away with you this advice. What Paul was struggling to get out by dictating and by his own hand was vital information without which you and I would be the poorer. His concern to describe, as his last benediction indicates, the grace of God.

God is a gracious God. How do I know that He's gracious? I know He's gracious because He sent Jesus to die for me. Jesus, His own Son, hung on Calvary's cross for my sin.

There's no other way of salvation. There's no other way of becoming a Christian. You can read the book of Common Prayer.

You can engage in all the liturgy that you want. You can engage in any religious practice. And all these taken together, some of them may be very meaningful, and on their own may be good, but they won't usher you into the grace of God and the experience of salvation.

There's only one way, and that, says Paul, is by acknowledging that Jesus is the fullness of God and that Jesus died on the cross to do for you what you couldn't do for yourself. Paul writes this letter to the Colossians to remind them of what they already know and to encourage them in the propagation of this message in the whole of their area. So Paul concludes by praying that grace, the grace of God, shall be upon them.

May God's grace be upon you this day, and may God, by the power of the Spirit, burn into your heart the message of this book and cause you to respond unto the glory and to glory in the gospel, the superb, unparalleled gospel of Jesus Christ, who came for you and for me to usher us into the family of the redeemed and to set us on a course for heaven and the new world, which God will one day, in his grace, usher in. Praise God that Paul dictated the book of Colossians, and we have it with us today to read and to profit from. Amen.

Father, we thank you for that gospel message which secures people even in unfortunate circumstances like Paul illustrates. We thank you for a gospel that makes even illness sweet, a gospel which enables us to continue in life however many pressures are upon us. Lord, we thank you for what we've learned over these past almost forty-odd weeks.

We praise you for this book. We thank you that it's practical. Thank you that it applies to our experience.

Now Lord, as we prepare to come around this table, or as some must be dismissed at this moment, we ask for your blessing to rest upon us. In the name of the Savior, amen.