Dennis Tuuri

# Colossians Sermon Transcript

We’re beginning a series of sermons going through the book of Colossians. The sermon title is Sovereignty, Grace, and Peace. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. Colossians 1, verses 1 and 2.

Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, and Timothy our brother, to the saints and faithful brethren in Christ who are at Colossae. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for these words that your Holy Spirit speaks to us today. Words of grace and peace to us. We ask for your grace and for your peace. We thank you for the definitive grace and peace we have with you through the work of Jesus Christ, our Savior. And we ask that you would continue to grow that grace and peace toward us and that we might be ministers of that grace and peace to others.

Bless us to that end with an understanding of your word by the power of your Holy Spirit. Amen.

Please be seated. In Matthew 5:48, our Savior says, “Therefore, be you perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” What? What? What does that frighten you a bit? Concern you at all? Jesus says, “Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.” I want to talk at the beginning of this before we get to these two verses about the overall purpose of Colossians.

Colossians is written to a church that Paul did not establish. It was likely established by Epaphroditus, who was mentioned several times, a faithful man who’s from Colossae as well. So the gospel had gone there, a church had been established, and while he doesn’t use the word church in this address, he will use it in other places in this book. So we know there’s a church there not initiated by Paul. So what’s the purpose of Paul’s epistle? This is an epistle that was to be circulated amongst other churches in the region as well, in the region of Phrygia.

So what’s the purpose of it? Well, I think the purpose is kind of related to what our Savior just said: “Be you perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.” We read in Colossians 1, verses 27 and 28, “To them God willed to make known what are the riches of the glory of his mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. Him we preach, warning every man and teaching every man in all wisdom that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus.”

So Paul says he’s sending this to them that they might be perfect in Christ Jesus as a result of preaching Christ. So following up on Gordon’s sermon, we preach Christ and him crucified to what end? That we might be perfect is what Paul says here in Colossians 1 in this same verse rather.

The ESV translates this word this way. So Colossians 1, verse 28 again: “Him we preach, warning every man and teaching every man in all wisdom that we may present every man mature in Christ Jesus.” Again, another translation. Let’s look at Colossians 4:12, “Epaphroditus, who is one of you, a bondservant of Christ, greets you, always laboring fervently for you in prayers that you may stand perfect and complete in all the will of God.”

Now again there the ESV version translates perfect differently. It says that Epaphroditus, who is one of you, a servant of Christ Jesus, greets you, always struggling on your behalf in his prayers, that you may stand mature and fully assured in all the will of God. This word perfect—telios in the Greek—is a word that implies maturity, not sinless perfection. God describes the Philippian church, for instance, as being perfect already.

And you could say, well, that’s in the covenantal sense of the term, but we don’t need to say that. These epistles are given to mature the body of Christ. The body of Christ had been planted in Colossae by Epaphroditus. Paul is writing very specifically and with these purpose statements in mind: that they might become mature, perfect, that they might grow in their understanding and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ, that they might be mature, able to stand and be his witnesses.

This is a theme from the beginning of the Bible all the way through into the gospel accounts and into the epistles as well. Adam grasped at equality with God. Adam didn’t wait for him to be given whatever rule, authority, good gifts God had for him. Adam put his hand in the cookie jar and mankind—every man—has been born with his hand in the cookie jar and unable to get it out and mom is bearing down on us.

Okay, that’s who we are. Fallen sinners who don’t want to wait. We’re impatient. The Old Testament refers to Jacob, prior to the incident with Esau, as a perfect man as well. And again, the Hebrew term there means mature. He was mature. Job is described as a perfect man. And again there we only understand that properly if we see it as maturity. I mean, very positive statements about people but no declaration of sinless perfection.

The purpose of the epistle to the Colossians is to mature them in the Lord Jesus Christ. And the purpose in preaching through this series of messages on the book of Colossians is the same thing. Philippians 3:15, “Let those of us who are mature, perfect, think this way. And if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you.” So we are to be those who are perfect, mature, and to that end we turn to the epistle to the Colossians.

Colossians 2:6 puts it this way: “As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him.” So the purpose of the epistle is an encouragement to walk in Christ. They’ve received Christ. Now we’re to move to maturity in Christ. The Colossians were the same as us. We’ve received Christ. Some of us are new Christians. Some of us have been Christians for a long time. But Colossians comes to us to have us walk more perfectly, more maturely in the way of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So that’s the purpose of this: maturity, not sinless perfection, maturity. That’s the problem with mankind. From one perspective, the Adamic fallen nature is a desire to be infantile and yet grasp for adult-like powers. Jesus reverses that. When he comes—he goes through 30 plus years doing various tasks, patiently waiting for his work to be accomplished. He’s unlike Adam. He doesn’t grasp after the authority that the Father will give him in his resurrection and then ascension to the right hand of the Father.

We’re to be the same way. We’re to be patient, but we’re to press toward maturity. Now, Paul in the opening two verses—that’s the context for these opening two verses. So what we’re going to talk about is sovereignty. Paul addresses that here. Grace and peace. This very familiar statement of Paul that he writes in various other places. So, first of all, sovereignty.

So what does the text say? It says, “Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God.” Right out of the shoot, I mean, the statement that we would look at and say it’s the first obvious theological statement in the book is that he is who he is. He’s doing what he does by the will of God. Now, you may think this is just limited to, you know, apostolic authority and some of that stuff, and that’s certainly at play here. He wants to let them know that he’s there as a messenger of Jesus Christ sent by the Father, right? By the will of the Father.

By the way, think about that. This is an emissary from heaven. This is a man speaking on behalf of the Lord Jesus Christ and the Father. Not just speaking on their behalf, specifically commissioned. It’s the legatos. It’s the ambassador. This is essentially Jesus speaking to the saints at Colossae. And when we read these texts, this is the Spirit of God speaking, present tense, to us through a God-willed emissary of his.

But Paul wants right off the bat to the Colossians to convince them or to demonstrate to them or to have us as we’re looking at it think about an aspect of who God is. God is sovereign. He’s not there by his will. He’s there by the will of the Father in heaven. And he wants us to know that right out of the shoot.

You know, a couple of verses that are kind of related to this. In John 15:16, Jesus said, “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should remain, that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give you.” That’s directly related to what Paul is saying here.

Jesus is talking to the disciples. He said, “You didn’t choose me. I chose you.” Let’s get this thing straight. It’s not a combination of you choosing me and me choosing. We need both parties involved to affect the thing. God says, “I chose you. I called you. I elected you. I loved you from before the foundation of the world.” This is the sovereign God that’s being presented by Paul.

To what purpose? To get them to walk in Christ and to be mature, to no longer—you know—to grow up and to not remain in the proper, although temporary, state of childhood.

John 1, verses 12 and 13 says the same thing generally about Christians as the text we just read in both Colossians and John says about those who are sent by him. “But as many as received him, to them he gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in his name, who were born—now listen—who were born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” It’s God’s will that brought us to faith in Jesus Christ.

We are not born again. We’re not new creatures in Christ as a result of our choice, our will. And Paul wants to make that point very prominently. This is the first thing he says. First, he’s an emissary of Christ Jesus, but he’s an apostle by the will of God. He asserts the sovereignty of God.

What the Westminster Confession of Faith—we could expand this out. We would say doctrinally that God has decreed whatsoever comes to pass, that the Lord God in his providence oversees everything that comes to pass. The Lord is sovereign. That’s the art. That’s a big bold trumpet call at the beginning of this call to faithful walking and to the maturation that we are supposed to be doing.

Another text, Philippians 2:12-13: “Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God who works in you both to will and to do for his good pleasure.”

Same thing. Work out your salvation because it’s God who is at work within you to will for his good pleasure. So the will of God is something that Paul frontloads here first in terms of himself as an apostle, but secondly, he’s getting them to see, you know, essentially, and he’ll be making this point throughout the epistle, that the will of God is what undergirds the whole process, the whole project. It’s the initiation of God, not for us to seek God, but rather he comes seeking us.

And so the will of God, the sovereignty of God, is placed very forward. Now, some people want to look at Colossians and say, “Well, it’s a New Testament book and so it’s New Testament and it’s not Old Testament.” You know, there’s a reason to talk like that. As we get through the book, we’ll see that the Jews who lived in Colossae—it was a Gentile area, but Jews had been transplanted there in the exile.

And so there were certainly Jewish influences and I think most of the problems going on at Colossae were Jewish problems. But having said that, we want to be very careful that we don’t sever what we read in Colossians from the Old Covenant. It’s the completion, the fulfillment of it. Okay. So when Paul says that he’s an apostle called by the will of God, he really is picking up, you know, the language of the Old Testament where messengers would be called and speak forth the message to a people that God was sovereignly electing.

Israel was God’s people. He was their beloved. And the language that Paul uses about the Colossians here is language that could appropriately be referred to in terms of Israel as well in the Old Testament. And so this sovereignty of God that we see in the Old Testament—this is the same God in the New Testament. And it’s the same God who now is sovereignly calling, raising up messengers to go to his people and to mature them, to bring them into a further knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So this is a message of sovereignty for Paul’s particular calling. It relates back to the message of God’s election of Israel. He elected Paul generally. This is a message to the church at Colossae, of course, as well. And so they see implications of this and will throughout the epistle of their own sovereign election by God both individually and as a church. So this is what is happening.

Now this is an important message for us. All right, we have at any given stage in our lives multiple numbers of problems. Some little, some big, and sometimes the big ones just seem like a torrent or a flood. And I know that in this past week or two for some families here there’s a torrent or a flood going on. Usually every time I preach there is in some family. You know, you got a couple hundred people and you’re going to have stuff going on. And I know that there are huge problems happening and we don’t know our way through things.

There are other situations got nothing to do with our congregation which huge problems have surfaced and people don’t know how to get through it all. Right? And you see, you’re tend to want to just give up hope. Right? But the declaration of the sovereignty of God, if it does nothing else, is to give us tremendous hope. He is overseeing the difficulties. He has decreed whatsoever comes to pass. We can rely on a sovereign God who attends to every detail of history.

Right? We can depend on him. And today, on the day of resurrection, the day of miracles, the day of God’s great demonstration of his power through the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ—death to life. That’s power. That’s the omnipotence of God at work. And today on this day we can say to whatever problems we have going on in our hearts, in our families, in our communities, in the broader Christian community, we can say, “The Lord’s in control. It’s going to be all right. We can relax today. We can rest today. We can rest in him.”

More than that, we can say, “Not only will it be okay, we can give thanks to God right now for the way it’s going to be okay.” It’s not just a matter of rest. Because God’s in control. Because the other aspect of this, you know, if all we do is say that God’s in control of everything—I made this point in my Sunday school class—if he’s sovereign, he’s omnipotent, he wills whatsoever comes to pass, he’s the one in charge, he’s working all this stuff, whatever he wants to do, he does. If we end it there, we’re sort of like Muslims. That’s the Muslim God. Islam means submit. And if the relationship is one of power and submission, and that’s all that is going on, well, you know, that’s not the Christian gospel. That’s not the Christian God.

His sovereignty is certainly real. It’s very important. It gives us hope. It gives us rest. But tied to that sovereignty is the love of God toward us. And look what Paul does here in this verse. You just look here. What does he say? He says he’s an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God. And then he’s going to greet them with grace and peace.

Look at the bookends there. The will of God, the sovereignty of God, which I 100 percent believe in. Think it’s an important doctrine we have to teach. It is the key to hope. I believe if I’m dependent upon what you’re going to do to me rather than God in control of everything, I’m lost. All hope is gone, right? Might as well sing a sad song because that’s bad. But that’s not true. God’s sovereign. But if all I know is that he’s sovereign, that doesn’t really help me much either because I don’t know what his purposes are.

But his purposes, the bookends are Christ Jesus. Now, the Colossians and you and I know who Christ Jesus is. He died for our sins. He’s Jesus, the one who would save his people from their sins. He’s Messiah, right? He’s the anointed one. He is our Lord, but he is also our Savior. And those two elements are sort of seen right in that name, Christ Jesus itself. The sovereign Lord, commanding obedience of course and all that stuff. But he’s Jesus who does that in the context of a demonstration of love and seeking and self-sacrifice, right?

It says that. And then what is this sovereign, overarching, powerful God saying to us? He says to you today, not “You did everything wrong this week. Your life is done.” He’s not saying that. He’s saying, “I know it’s really difficult and I’m here to tell you, grace be upon you. I’m here to tell you peace is yours. And I’m here to tell you that grace and peace will abound in your life. It will grow. Right?”

That’s the import of what he says here. It’s a benediction. It’s a prayer. It’s a statement of truth. And it’s a statement of assurance to us that those gifts of grace and peace that are already ours, they’ll grow and become more manifest. So the sovereignty of God, the absolute sovereignty of God that Paul wants to make that point right out of the shoot, verse one, right at the head of the list of God’s attributes here, is his sovereignty.

But the context for it is everything, brothers and sisters. Yes, God is sovereign, but God exists as three persons, you know, in a loving relationship of self-sacrifice toward each other through all eternity. That’s the God that Paul is the ambassador for. That’s the God who sends his Son to die for our sins. That’s the God who says, “I’m here to demonstrate to you grace and peace, to make it a reality in your life, and to cause it to increase and grow.”

Now, that’s pretty good stuff. Now sit in whatever problem you’ve got going on in your life today, you know, sit. Think about that. God is sovereign. God loves you. He says to you today, his Spirit says to you, “Grace and peace from a sovereign Lord who has already demonstrated to you the greatest act of love that can be shown, which is the death of Jesus for you.”

Now that lets us rest. That gives us, you know, a degree of peace in the midst of troubled seas. That helps us to be okay in the midst of it all. And more than that, my wish and prayer for you is no matter what’s going on in your life or what’s going on in my life or what’s going on in other people’s lives, this is a day of joy, not just a day of rest. This is a day of celebration because God is sovereign. The end of these matters are always better than their beginnings because that’s the sovereign arc of God in history.

All right. So sovereignty is an exceedingly important doctrine to state here from the get-go, but it’s always placed in the context in the scriptures of love. You know, we just sang this psalm. Right? What does it say? The last line: “Be acceptable in your sight, oh Lord, my strength and my redeemer.” That’s the same two things, right? You see this over and over again in Scripture. My strength and my redeemer. My sovereign. My powerful one. My omnipotent one. My strength. And that strength is being exercised as my redeemer, to save me, to sacrificially give his life for us, to give us grace and peace in abounding measure, more and more and more.

How do you walk in maturity? How does Paul, God speaking through Paul, encourage the Colossians in that walk? We talked about earlier: How do we mature? We mature in an understanding of God’s sovereignty in the context of his love and his grace and his mercy and his peace. That’s how you do it. I mean, this opening salutation—we would call it—sets up everything else. And it’s always the way God reveals himself to be in the context of our world.

All right. So sovereignty set in the context of love resulting in hope and rest and actually joy.

Couple more quick aspects of this, and you know I’m not going to be telling you anything probably most of you don’t all know. But so Paul then says this. He says that, you know, by the will of God he declares God’s sovereignty. “Timothy our brother”—probably Timothy, the brother. I’ll talk about this maybe in a couple of minutes. But there is a little structure to this verse. And Timothy the brother—to the saints. Actually in your version it says “to the saints and faithful brethren in Christ who are at Colossae.”

If you look at Young’s Literal Translation, the Greek order seems to be different. The Greek order is “to the saints who are at Colossae, faithful brethren in Christ Jesus.” What’s the difference? Timothy the brother. Saints at Colossae. Faithful brothers in Jesus. So Timothy, Paul’s coworker, right? He’s not the apostle Paul is, but he’s stated here in the address. Timothy the brother, the representation of who? Jesus. Our elder brother, right? Firstborn among many brothers. That’s Jesus.

And so Timothy’s this representation to them as Paul is really the brother. And to the end that the saints at Colossae, the saints in Oregon City, the saints at Reformation Covenant Church would be strengthened and are identified as faithful brethren in Christ Jesus. See, it moves from Timothy to us around the center of this, which is the specific recipient region, which is important as well.

And then what does he tell them? “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” Now you’ll notice that matches with the first verse, right? “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” “Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God.” In other words, by the will of God the Father. It’s a match again. So this is a little section, but let’s talk about these two words: grace and peace.

And you know what grace is. I mean, most of you do. Grace is unmerited favor. That means that why we’re here is not because of our works, our ability to deserve this, that, or the other thing. It’s exactly the opposite. The grace of God has appeared in the person and work of Jesus Christ to give us blessings and to gift us quite apart from anything that we deserve. If he gives us what we deserve, we end up in hell.

So the grace of God has appeared in the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. And that grace is what Paul declares to them. And understand again what I said earlier. He’s telling them, you know, that the grace of God has appeared in Christ and you know this and you’re recipients of this. You already stand in a grace relationship to the Father. Now the grace is a gift and the greatness of the gift depends on the greatness of the one giving you a gift. That’s the way it sort of works in this particular time in history. The gift is determined by the giver. And in this case the giver is the powerful sovereign Lord of all history. He’s the one that’s given you this gift. And so grace is immeasurable. The grace is immeasurable because the giver is immeasurable.

And we’re already recipients of that. We know that we’re here because of the grace of God in the gospel. The gospel of Jesus Christ is proclaimed to us. God graciously opens our eyes and our hearts to it. And we’re the recipients of grace definitively. And if we all die tonight, we know that by the grace of God, not by what we do between now and then, we’re going to end up with our Savior. And he’s going to be telling us, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.” That’s because of grace. That’s this grace.

And so Paul wants the Colossians to hear right from the get-go that there’s a sovereign God, but that this sovereign God is speaking words of grace to them. And that grace—that grace is unmerited favor in spite of what we actually deserve. It’s the gift of God to us. So we are deserving God’s judgment and punishment, but he gives us the gift of grace. This is the grace of God that’s demonstrated to us, as I said earlier, through the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

This is why frequently in the New Testament when people depart from one another they’ll commend them to the grace of God. So you know we have a word “goodbye,” and goodbye is a contraction of “God be with you.” That’s what it means. We lose words over time as we slip away from their source and from the God who gives us these words. But goodbye literally means “God be with you.” You probably heard this from me before, but Bob Dylan in one of his songs—”Goodbye is too good a word.”

So I’ll just say “Fairly well.” He didn’t want to wish God’s blessing on the person he was talking to, just “Fairly well. Hope you’re doing okay, but I’m not going to tell you God be with you because I know he’s not.” Okay. Well, the God of grace be with you. We’re commended in various places in the New Testament. You know, people when they would leave each other, they would commend each other to the grace of God because again, we’ve received grace definitively through the Lord Jesus Christ.

But grace has to be a basic operating principle that God has toward us continually. And we’re to grow in a knowledge and submission and understanding of that grace. Right? That’s what we’re supposed to do. So we’re to commend each other to the grace of God. In Acts 20:32, we read that they were commended to the Lord and to the word of his grace. To the word of his grace. So the word of God itself is a grace word. It’s the word of his grace to us.

When you read the Scriptures, it is a law word. It tells us what we’re supposed to be doing, right? Now that we’re saved, this is the way. Walk in it as Paul will do with the Colossians. But this text from Corinthians tells us it is certainly also a grace word. That word of grace is the whole of the gospel and the whole of the content of the Bible that the Lord God has given to us.

So the grace of God is what we’re committed to. That grace is the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. His gracious act of dying for our sins. And we’re being called to renewed Christian living by this text in the principle of grace, not to fall back to works. You know, if the old man knows he can’t be justified by works, he’s thinking, “Maybe I can be sanctified by works.” But the principle at work in us is a grace principle. It’s a grace truth. Principle is not a good word. It kind of sounds too philosophical. Truth is given by a truth speaker who is God. And so grace is a truth that we’re to live our lives on the basis of.

So Paul tells them, “Grace to you.” And then he says, “Peace to you.” Now that’s the order. Grace and peace. It’s always that order. I don’t think it ever says peace and grace. Maybe it does, but I don’t think so, because grace is what leads to peace, right? That’s the way it works. Peace with God is what we have definitively through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. But we have that peace because the grace of God is that Jesus paid the price for our sins that we couldn’t pay. And he lived a life of sinless perfection that we never could live.

So the movement is grace to peace. Now that’s really important. It might sound like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it, pastor.” But look, first of all, let’s talk a little bit about peace, then we’ll come back to grace and peace.

What’s peace? Well, it’s interesting. In the Greek language at the time—last night I was listening to NPR and I heard the new Keith Richards album. He does a version of “Good Night Irene.” I couldn’t sometimes I thought it was actually Bob Dylan. It was astonishing. Keith Richards, Bob Dylan, who knows? Very strange. But the song “Good Night Irene.” Right? Irene means peace. And you know you have this word irenic. Some people are irenic. That means they’re peaceable. Right? So this word in Greek is Irene essentially.

So to the Greeks, Irene, or to be irenic meant not to be involved in warfare, meant the absence of conflict. But again, see, we don’t want to make this into a New Covenant book cut off from Old Testament roots because we’ll miss it totally. The Greek word Irene was what the Septuagint—the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, okay, which was in use at the time—our Savior would quote it at times. The Septuagint used the Greek word Irene as the word for the Hebrew shalom. Shalom.

So when we look at that, when we see—if you do the study of peace in the New Testament, it’s shalom. It’s not Greek peace. It’s not the absence of conflict. God doesn’t wish for you today that all the problems you’ve got in relationships, that you simply aren’t at war with anybody anymore. That’s not the goal. The goal is that you have rightly restored relationships to people.

Now there’s peace with God, right? There’s peace with God. And Jesus is our peace. The gospel is referred to as the gospel of peace. So there’s peace with God. And certainly Paul is alluding to that here, right? There’s this vertical dimension where we have peace with God, and we have peace with God through the work of Jesus. And we’re to abide in that peace. Okay?

But peace in the shalom sense—Hebrew, Old Testament sense—brought into the Colossian sense is well-being, human flourishing, good, blessing, right relationships to God, yes, but also to our fellow man, even to ourselves. Right? The accusations die off as we have peace with God. We have peace actually with ourselves and we have peace with the environment, the created order of God. Right? This is his world. This is my Father’s world.

So I’ve got peace with all of that because of the work of Jesus. Right? And that’s shalom. That means blessing. That means not just not fighting with your brother, your sister, your wife, or your husband, your pastor, your congregant. Doesn’t mean just not fighting with him. Means you got good relationship with him. You don’t want to—when sin happens and breaks relationships, you don’t want to go back to where you were. What’s the point of the whole process? Then you want to have a better relationship to the person on the other side of that. And that’s what Paul is saying here.

Paul is saying to the Colossians, “Peace to you.” The Spirit of God says to the Colossians through the Father and through Jesus Christ’s emissary. The Spirit speaks peace to the church, and that doesn’t mean the absence of conflict. That means the full-blown health of the entire organism. Okay? It means everything. Means the whole thing. Shalom is the presence of God. And like in the Psalms, when God walks along, the flowers bloom, the trees, the birds come out, life flows because God is life. Okay? That’s the imagery setting up in one or two of the Psalms. That’s peace. That’s blessing. When you have the benediction placed upon you today, that peace is what the goal of the thing is. It’s a torrent of blessings. The benediction from Numbers that you know culminates in this sense of peace, well-being. Okay.

So you get the point. Now, grace and peace. Jesus died for our sins. We’ve got peace with God. But on the horizontal dimension, you see, how’s it going to work out? Well, we’re going to be gracious in our dealings with others. We want grace from them. We want to exhibit grace to that to them. Now, I’m not talking about cheap grace. It just says, “Yeah, go ahead, sleep with my wife.” That’s not what we’re talking about.

But we’re to have gracious attitudes toward each other, right? In the horizontal dimension. And peace frequently linked, by the way, to justice or righteousness—same thing. Righteousness toward God but righteousness is justice toward our fellow believers, our neighbors, right? So peace, this resulting order of things in relationship, has to happen first as we’re gracious with each other. That’s the point I guess is a simple point: graciousness in relationships is the opening gambit, if you will. It’s the beginning of developing peace in relationships. You can’t get to peace in relationships if you don’t bring grace into the conversation.

If all you bring into the right ordering of relationships is the will of God again, right? “Obey me.” That’s that you’ve missed the mark. Okay? We’re to live in by the principles of the truths of grace. That’s what produces peace. So this opening salutation isn’t just a throwaway line here. This is really significant stuff, as is the length of my sermon there. Oh no, we had Gordon. So I got a couple more minutes. Had that membership thing going. Okay. We could turn to lots of verses about peace and how peace is—this is Jesus himself is our peace. It says I think in Ephesians, right? He is our peace.

So the culmination of this is in that kind of relationship peace. And again, the address is Colossae, right? It’s the city, which we’ll talk about in just a couple of minutes as we wrap up. So we have grace and peace growing us to maturity. And that’s the way it has to work.

Now I want to say one other thing here. Paul twice uses the greeting “Grace, mercy, and peace.” And you know where those are? I didn’t know, but I saw a post by Jack Phelps. This—I might have known and forgot. I don’t know, but it wasn’t conscious to me. Jack Phelps made a post to our denominational list and he mentioned this: that those two occurrences are in the pastoral epistles.

So when Paul writes to the church, he says, “Grace and peace.” And when Paul writes to pastors, he says, “Grace, mercy, and peace.” Okay. Well, why? Jack says this: “Church leaders both need mercy themselves, congregants—hear me, church leaders, I’m not just talking about me, this isn’t self-interest, but church leaders generally both need mercy themselves. And Dennis, hear this, Gordon, hear this, Doug and Chris, hear this. And need to exemplify mercy in their treatment of the flock and the world, perhaps especially their fellow shepherds.”

The idea here being merciful to fellow shepherds. I believe it is appropriate to infer from this greeting, Jack writes, that Christ leaders are called upon to demonstrate all three of these characteristics in their lives and in their dealings with others. So pastors are to demonstrate these, receive these characteristics. But it only lives if you give it away. You only have received it if you demonstrate it and give it to others. And if we’re recipients of grace, mercy, and peace, the truth of that pudding is whether we live lives of grace, mercy, and peace to other people, with others.

Grace, mercy, and peace, Jack wrote, should be exemplified by the conduct and the words of those in positions of authority in Christ’s church. Grace, mercy, and peace should be exemplified by the conduct of Gordon, Chris, Doug, myself, and other shepherds. Our words need to be seasoned with grace, mercy, and peace. We should speak the truth, but we must speak the truth carefully, graciously.

Now, that’s an obligation for the four pastors in the room. Maybe there’s other—Craig Mashenko is here. He’s an elder. He’s a pastor in the church as well. Same thing for Craig. So—so—but see, the point here is it’s the same with you. You’re the recipients of grace and peace. But you’re only really the recipients. We’ll know if you receive it if you’re being gracious and peacemaking with others. Do you see? It’s a demonstration. It’s a blessing to you. It’s a prayer for you: grace and peace. It’s a call for you to grow in that as you walk in Christ.

And it’s a call for you, just like it’s a call for us, to see that exemplified in your conduct, exemplified in your words and interactions. All right.

I hope this is the last thing. I think it is. I want to talk a little bit about Colossae—death and resurrection. It’s interesting to me. You know, you read these accounts and there’s the name right at the center of the structure here, right? At least the way I look at it, I think that’s the center. Is the saints at Colossae. And I will talk sometime in the future about the relationship of city and regional churches. We had a great meeting on Wednesday, as I mentioned earlier. Gordon was there, but we came to consensus that yes, everybody believes in the three dimensions of your relationship to the church.

You’re to be related to a particular—what the New Testament would call a house church, or we would call it a local church. Some people would say that if you want to use biblical terminology, a DC is an expanded house church. And actually there’s evidence that the houses in the second century, at least, maybe first century, were being remodeled and expanded to fit more and more people. So the house church was kind of transforming into more of a local church that we would call. But it’s the same thing. And then there were these city churches. And then you have connection to the universal church. That’s who you are.

You have connections, according to the New Testament, in three dimensions. You should be attached to a house or local church. You should understand that you’re attached to a regional or city church, in our case the church in Oregon City. And that brings a lot of implications, brothers and sisters, that we’re going to be working out for decades, if not centuries. But it does. And then you’re connected to the universal church.

Good enough. So there’s saints at Colossae. We’ll talk about this more. It’s we’ll look at the text in Colossians to see these uses of the term, but there—what is Colossae? What is it? You remember when I talked on Colossae a few months back in our affirmed share series? That Colossae means colossal, monstrous, huge, gargantuan, right? Big Colossus of Rhodes, that kind of stuff. And it’s interesting because at one time it was—at one time it was described as that great city, that huge city of wealth and prosperity. It was in a great agricultural valley: olives, sheep, red wool, which would be Colossian wool, dyed red.

I mean, it was like big deal, right? Huge city, big city. But as things work out over time—probably in the third and fourth century, the kind of the route shifted, the river went in a different direction, you know, certain towns got bypassed in the road system, whatever happens. And two cities, maybe ten to twelve miles on either side of it, they became prosperous big cities. And by the time leading up to the writing of this epistle, or a century before actually, they were now described as a little town of no significance.

And in fact it was so little and of such little significance that it wasn’t even located in our day and age till 1856. Another apologetic fact, right? Is the Bible true and accurate? Well, it said there was a city Colossae. Nobody could ever find it, but a hundred years ago they found it. But it was that insignificant. Is the point here. Okay. Little tiny city. Insignificant.

Let me let me tell you how significant Colossians became. We are in a small city. We’re in what used to be the city in Oregon. We were Oregon City, right? And now we got Portland over there and we’re kind of backwater city now. Neighborhood community, bedroom community rather. Blah blah. So there’s some connections, but you know, it’s fascinating what God does through the proclamation of his word.

The town never regained significance. In fact, there were seismic activities that might have destroyed the town altogether. Great earthquakes were part of the region. And that was part of the decline of Colossae. But you know what was exceedingly significant in the development of Christianity? It was this epistle we’re looking at. It was the letter that Paul wrote to this little backwater town, in this small group of Christians gathering together to worship God.

And the Spirit of God spoke to that particular city in this epistle. This information I’m going to read is found in the Omnibus 4 textbook, that’s why I asked for it this last week. Thanks to Ivan Shenko for letting me borrow that. But what we read in that account, in the first few centuries of the church, the book of Colossians, the letter to the Colossians, was important for the development of Christology—that Jesus was God in the flesh. We’ll get to that as we go through the book, but very important book for the development of a correct understanding that Jesus Christ was God in the flesh.

And then after Constantine’s conversion, Colossians became one of the key biblical texts to defend the Christian empire. From Colossians, the church historians drew the insight that Jesus was the ruler of all things. And he added that the emperor Constantine was the earthly image of the heavenly king. Jesus was the ruler of all things. We read it in Colossians. And Constantine converted. Constantine was a representative of Jesus in the particular realm in which he ruled.

And there was this connection drawn because of the book of Colossians. Jesus overcomes principalities and powers, right? Colossians 1:16: “For by him all things were created that are in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through him and for him.” Verse 20: “And by him he would reconcile all things to himself, by him, whether things on earth or things in heaven, having made peace through the blood of his cross.”

And again, Colossians 2:15: “Having disarmed principalities and powers, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in it.” Jesus overcoming principalities and powers. And his relationship to earthly principalities and powers was seen as a model for what Constantine did. So did Constantine. Constantine overcame principalities and powers.

In Colossians, Jesus governs over a people that includes Jews, Greeks, barbarians, Scythians, slaves, and freemen. That’s Colossians 3:11. And Constantine reigned over an empire that contained all the same elements. You see? So did Constantine. Jesus is the great peacemaker. Colossians 1:20: “By him to reconcile all things to himself, by him, whether things on earth or things in heaven, having made peace through the blood of his cross.” Jesus is the great peacemaker.

And the very same Greek term peacemaker, or peace, was used to describe the Pax Romana first of Augustus, not at all connected in a godly sense to God. But then Constantine renewed the Pax Romana, the peace, as a representation of the peace that Christ was bringing.

What’s my point? My point is insignificant—letter to an insignificant group of people that once had been great, now we’re nothing. Maybe you in your life, you know, think once you were great, now you’re nothing. Churches go through these cycles. Cities go through these cycles over time. And yet this letter sent to them has tremendous power. And the names of some of those very people will be recorded for eternity as an example in a letter that established the rule of Jesus Christ, the peace of Jesus Christ, the Christology, who he was—God in flesh.

All these important truths connecting up the realities of what the Scriptures teach to then what happens in the context of earth and particularly its rulers and governors. You see? It had tremendous significance. It’s a death and resurrection. That’s my point. It’s a different kind of resurrection. Colossae didn’t become a great city again, but it became a name and a city that had given birth through the church that was birthed there itself.

It gave birth to this epistle by the Spirit of God, bringing them simple news of grace and peace. But that ultimately had tremendous significance for human history through the work of Constantine.

Now, that’s the story of Colossae. And I think that’s the story of history. I think that’s what happens. I think that as we see the little things that God blesses us with and calls us to and empowers us to do, as we work out grace and peace in tiny ways in our own relationships, we’re creating peace. We’re being peacemakers. We may not be Constantine, but we’ve got our own little space to fill, as Tom Petty says, right? And how are we going to fill it? If we fill it taking the word of God and the Spirit of God speaking to us through his word, and we walk in maturity and we walk with faithfulness and we walk as recipients of grace, mercy, and peace, and as a result, as dispensers of grace, mercy, and peace from a sovereign and loving God, well, the possibilities are limitless.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for the wonderful blessings that these two little bitty verses teach us. And we didn’t even begin to go down into them, Father, in any kind of detail. But we thank you for the tremendous blessing of your word. We thank you that this word is the voice of the Holy Spirit to us. That the Spirit speaks now through Colossians to us. Empower your people, Lord God. Give them grace. Give them increasing grace and increasing peace as a result of that grace.

And may we each of us be people that are gracious and peacemakers in the very difficult task that some of us will have to engage in this week. We rely upon your sovereignty and we rely upon your love and your mercy and peace to us to help make us peacemakers and grace-bringers because of the work of the Lord Jesus Christ, who is our peace, who by his death brought us into the grace of relationship with him and you, Father, in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Bless us, Lord God, in Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.