Now let us turn to the letter written
by Paul to the Colossians, chapter one, and
the short passage that begins with verse twenty
-four and concludes with verse twenty-seven.
Now I rejoice in what was suffered for
you, and I fill up in my flesh
what is still lacking in regard to Christ's
afflictions, for the sake of his body, which
is the church.
I have become its servant by the commission
God gave me to present to you the
word of God in its fullness, the mystery
that had been hidden for ages and generations,
but is now disclosed to his saints.
To them God has chosen to make known
among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this
mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope
of glory.
You will remember that toward the end of
the last passage, the one we were considering
a week ago, we were led by Mr.
McLeod, emphasis is there placed upon continuing in
the faith, when once we have set out
in following our Lord.
Verse thirty-three, there is a very important
if there.
If you continue in your faith, established and
firm, not moved from the hope held out
for you in the gospel.
What the Apostle Paul there is saying is
this, that all Christian men and women will
at long last be presented before God the
Father without blame, without fault, without blemish, he
says in another place, faultless.
He is looking forward to the great climax
of our redemption and of our salvation.
But now he makes it hang upon that
very important little if.
If you continue in the faith and become
so grounded in it that no one is
able to shift you out of it or
to shunt you up a side street or
a side alley where you are away from
the mainstream of divine truth and revelation and
your upper cul-de-sac that never leads
you anywhere.
What Paul is saying is this, as Mr.
McLeod made it very clear last Sunday morning,
eternal life has the capacity to go on.
And if you have eternal life in Jesus
Christ, the eternal life which you have is
a life that will allow you to fall,
but if you fall you get up again.
It will allow you to be tempted, but
if you are tempted you will overcome it
in due course.
So that whatever temporary stay you may have
in a land of doubt or a land
of rebellion or a land of sin, you
will overcome it and you will keep on
going on.
In other words, you will persevere.
This is of the nature of eternal life.
Eternal life is not life to get you
from the life you used to live to
start a new life.
It's not that kind of temporary life.
It's eternal life.
Eternal in its quality, eternal in its duration.
So that you see, eternal life is a
very mighty, mighty thing, mighty phenomenon experienced in
the souls of men.
Now let's put that in a different way.
Putting it now from the vantage point of
our situation here this morning, we would have
to put it in this way.
The decision involved in becoming a Christian must
be a lifetime commitment.
It must include no clauses, no provisions for
opting out.
So that if you have come to Christ
with the notion that you can opt out,
you have never come to Christ.
If your allegiance to Jesus Christ is a
kind of temporary thing to get you out
of a difficult situation or to lead you
through a certain area of your life and
experience, it is not a saving experience or
relationship.
The saving experience is a commitment for life
and a commitment to death.
Now this is serious.
There is no such thing in the Christian
life, for example, as an uncrucified person.
That means you and I have to die
to self in order to get it going
with the people of God and to be
united to Jesus Christ.
The very baptism of the Spirit whereby we
are united to Christ is a baptism which
crucifies us to the world, to the flesh,
and to the devil, and makes us alive
and responsive to God.
And that comes not as the apex of
a long experience leading to it, but at
the very threshold of the Christian life.
Now, this therefore is a very important passage.
A Christian enlisting as a follower of Jesus
Christ must be prepared to burn his bridges
behind him.
And from the epic story from whence we
derive that imagery, to burn your bridge behind
you means you are not going back, you
are going forward.
And you see, this divides the professing church
right down the middle.
For there are many people who have made
decisions for Christ that have not had their
whole heart, nor their whole mind, nor their
whole will in it.
And sooner or later they have turned away.
Just as Judas found that he could have
his price, others have found that the devil
has offered them their price for turning off
the path, and turning back, and becoming even
the agents of Satan.
And some who were in the church as
apparently leaders have become in due course the
very opponents of the truth they once stood
for.
Now, that is the background to this text.
Paul now is apparently going on to a
different tack altogether.
But he cannot do so completely, so that
in this new passage, beginning with verse 24,
we have, as it were, a little window
opening into the soul of the apostle himself.
Indicating, perhaps, that all very unselfconsciously, but indicating
how he looked upon himself, as utterly bound
to his crucified Lord.
A little window that enables us to see
into the heart of the apostle Paul, and
see though that here is a man whose
burnt his bridges behind him right enough, and
who, and here is the climax of it,
who rejoices in sufferings for the sake of
Christ and His church.
Now, there are two things alone that we
can focus upon this morning.
The first is, as I have just indicated,
this notion of rejoicing in suffering.
Rejoicing in suffering.
The beginning of verse 24.
Now, he says, I rejoice in what was
suffered for you.
Let's look for a moment, very briefly, at
the suffering envisaged and the joy expressed there.
The suffering envisaged.
Now, there may be an echo there to
Christ's sufferings for the Colossians, for their salvation.
There may be sufferings undergone by our blessed
Lord Jesus Christ in order to bring pardon
and reconciliation with God, and the knowledge of
God, and sins forgiven.
But if that is so, it is, in
this context, secondary to Paul's reference to his
own sufferings.
To Paul's sufferings.
The sufferings that Paul himself has experienced in
relation to the church in general, and in
relation to the church at Colossae in particular.
Now, what were these sufferings?
Well, I don't propose to take a long
time to go into this, because there are
many aspects to Paul's sufferings.
But let's just try and put it in
a nutshell.
It boils down to this.
Paul is in prison at this point.
Why was he in prison?
He was in prison because he insisted on
declaring his master's word to men and women
everywhere.
Now, there was no other reason for that.
Paul was only in prison because he was
being faithful to God's calling and to that
which is involved in Christian discipleship.
No other reason.
If the apostle Paul said, I'm not going
to be a Christian anymore, I'm not going
to placard Christ abroad anymore, well, Paul would
no longer be in prison.
There was no reason for Paul's imprisonment other
than this.
His loyalty to the Christ who called him,
and to the calling with which Christ addressed
him.
Here he finds himself in prison.
I guess it is true to say that
the words of Ephesians chapter 3 and verse
1 apply equally well to the Colossians addressed
here.
In Ephesians 3, he says, For this reason
I, Paul, the prisoner of Jesus Christ for
you Gentiles, the prisoner of Jesus Christ for
the sake of you Gentiles.
This is why Paul was in prison.
One, he was a prisoner to the Lord
Jesus Christ.
He was dedicated.
He was consecrated.
Whose man was he?
He was Christ's man.
But he was Christ's man for the Gentiles'
sake.
In other words, to bring the gospel of
Christ to the Gentiles particularly, not exclusively, but
particularly.
He was called to be the apostle to
the Gentiles.
Why was he in prison?
He was in prison because he insisted on
being loyal to his Lord and then loyal
to his Lord's calling.
Those words link us with the thoughts expressed
in this very Colossian epistle.
Right at the end, chapter 4 verses 10
and 11 and verse 18, we hear little
snippets which remind us of this.
My fellow prisoners, he says.
Aristarchus sends you his greetings.
So does Mark, the cousin of Barnabas, etc.,
etc.
In verse 18, this very personal word, I,
Paul, write this greeting with my own hand.
His own hands, you see, were in chains.
He may have written a snippet here and
there before, but at the end he writes
the last verse.
He concludes the letter all in his own
hand, chain or no chain.
He uses the quill and he writes the
last verse.
But now notice.
I, Paul, write this greeting in my own
hand.
Remember my chains.
Don't forget my chains.
Here I am.
I'm enchained in prison.
Why?
Because I've insisted on being loyal to my
Lord in the spreading of the gospel.
That's why.
And of course it's not only the physical
involvement.
There is the psychological and there is much
else.
But now let's notice the joy expressed.
But now I rejoice in what was suffered
for you.
I rejoice in it.
And this is where we come to the
miracle of divine grace, you see.
I rejoice in what I suffered for you
and am suffering.
Whatever the nature and extent of Paul's suffering
for the spiritual well-being of the Colossians,
he does not resent it nor does he
wish to forget it.
He positively rejoices in it, both in its
past aspects and in its then present reality.
Now lest anyone should rush to the premature
conclusion that the apostle was somewhat psychopathic here
and he was a lover, a crazy lover
of suffering, for example, let's hasten to add
that there is no evidence whatsoever for that
in the New Testament.
None whatsoever.
Paul, like everyone else, every ordinary, every normal
human being, escaped suffering when that was possible
and when it was morally tenable.
But there were times when he could not
escape suffering and be loyal to his Lord,
loyal to his message, loyal to the commission
that had been given him, loyal to the
people who had been entrusted to him to
evangelize and to care for.
And when loyalty to them and to his
calling and to his Lord required that he
suffer, suffer he did.
But I want you to notice it was
suffering when suffering was necessary rather than deny
his Lord.
He wasn't the kind of crazy person who
wanted to suffer or delighted in suffering as
suffering.
His joy is that he's allowed to bear
in his body the brands of the Lord
Jesus and suffer for him.
But now, even so, even so, and this
is the point here, even though he embraced
the sufferings of obedience and the anguish and
the torture that came his way mentally, spiritually,
physically, he was not a joyless sufferer, not
a songless pilgrim.
He was not a joyless pilgrim.
Here is a man who could sing with
Silas at midnight in the Philippian jail.
Here is a man who could sing in
prison at midnight, notice, despite the fact that
he had been illegally, illegally arrested.
Now, if anybody is illegally or allegedly illegally
arrested in Toronto today, can you imagine them
singing praises at midnight in Don Joe's still
open?
That shows my ignorance.
Never mind about that.
Can you imagine them not on your life?
We've moved such a long way from there.
But here is a man who was illegally
arrested, then he was stripped of his clothes,
then he was beaten, all illegally, and then
he was put into the care of the
jailer, and he was cast into the very
innermost cell, and when he got into the
innermost cell, his feet were placed in the
stocks, all illegally, all painful to bear.
But he's singing at midnight.
Unless you have any misunderstanding about the kind
of songs he was singing, he was praising
God at midnight.
That's what it says.
You see, the Christian is a nightingale, singing
in the night.
And here is this man out of the
anguish of soul and of body, expressing his
gratitude to God for the privilege of being
bound to a crucified master, and the privilege
of serving him to bring life from his
wounds to the miseries of men.
Oh, yes, Paul knew something of the quality
of joy that is not dependent upon circumstances
without or within.
And here he sings, rejoicing in suffering.
Now, you see the point.
It's illustrating what Mr. McLeod finished with last
year.
Paul is going on, you see.
His Christian calling was not just to make
a decision, period.
His Christian calling was to become Christ's servant.
Lord, what will you have me to do?
You go into Damascus, and it will be
told you what I want you to do,
and we shall see something about that in
a moment.
I'll tell you what I have you to
do.
I have a life work for you to
do.
I want you to be bound to me,
the crucified, risen Lord, and I want you
to do something for me.
You're going to be a special messenger.
And you see, here is a man rejoicing
in his suffering.
You know anything of that?
Is there someone here this morning who is
grating against the service of the Lord?
Is there someone who is itching to get
out of the post of duty for Christ?
Oh, my friends, there is nothing that reveals
the quality and the fiber of your spiritual
life and mine like this.
The way we just try to run away
from a duty laid upon us by the
very Christ who died for us.
Now, that leads on quite naturally, rejoicing in
suffering, to this.
Perhaps they're not to be distinguished.
I have distinguished them.
Resolute in service.
Resolute.
Having assured the Colossians of his joy in
contemplating what he had already suffered for the
sake of Christ and his church, Paul proceeds
to assure them of his resolution to persevere
in the exercise of his calling quite irrespective
of what may happen.
And I fill up in my flesh what
is still lacking in regard to Christ's afflictions
for the sake of his body which is
the church.
I have become its servant, the servant of
the church, by the commission God gave me
to present to you the word of God
in all its fullness.
What this man is saying is this.
I've had a commission, and therefore I must
not become so self-conscious and so conscious
of the past sufferings that I've undergone as
to forget my duty for the present and
for the future.
I must keep on going.
And I'm doing just that.
And I mean to be resolute.
Have you noticed, I'm sure you have, how
the emotions of joy and of sorrow can
alike lead to self-indulgence, self-indulgent reveries
on the one hand or self-effacing sacrifices
on the other.
They can make us look inward and brood
over our own experience, whatever its nature, joy
or anguish, or they can goad us to
action for the sake of others.
Now joy and sorrow can do that.
You see, that's the marvel of Terry Fox's
experience, isn't it?
It doesn't often happen that way.
His pain and his traumatic experience has made
him more and more conscious of the needs
of others and determined to do something to
meet the needs of others in and through
his own sufferings.
Rather than be devoured with self-indulgence trying
to console himself on thoughts of self-pity,
he has turned out.
He's seen the world in need.
And his very suffering, you see, has been
a kind of dynamite that has catapulted him
into orbit.
It's not often that sorrow does that, save
with good, godly, Christ-loving, Christ-honoring Christian
people.
Joy may do it, often than sorrow.
But both joy and sorrow can take this
turn.
And we become so full up with them,
we go around advertising our joys.
See what a joyous person I am.
You know, my life is a thrill.
I sing day and night.
I never have a cloud.
My life is all bright.
My, I just want to dance.
I must be careful what I do.
The elders are in the front here.
You know, you find people like that.
You see, it's a very sad thing.
The same steam that can pull a train
can be diffused by blowing a whistle.
And you can use all the steam in
the boiler to blow a whistle that calls
attention to yourself.
Or you can make that steam drive the
engine, pull the carriages across the continent.
Men and women in Christ, what is it
that they need?
What is your pain and what is your
joy doing with you and with me?
Am I whistling to call attention to my
joy or to my sorrow?
Or is it driving me to think of
others, others, others, others, others, to fulfill the
ministry that God has given me in His
blessed Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Now that's what we have here.
And this in turn, you see, takes us
back to where Mr. McLeod left us last
Lord's Day, to this principle of perseverance.
Eternal life has the quality of sending us
on, sending us forward.
The Spirit of God is given to us,
not just gradually or occasionally, but He lives
in our hearts to enable us to be
other than we would be.
There are two things alone that I can
just refer to here.
Paul embraced his suffering as a facet of
his Christian calling.
Paul embraced, now let's get this, he put
his arms around suffering as something which Jesus
gave him as part of his calling.
I fill up in my flesh what is
still lacking in regard to Christ's afflictions for
the sake of His body.
Now I suppose there's something there I ought
to say a word about first, isn't there?
Otherwise somebody may misunderstand the passage.
Does Paul mean here, let me deal with
the problem before I move on.
Does Paul really mean to say here that
the sufferings of Christ were not adequate in
themselves and that he must add to them?
Is that the implication of this passage, that
Jesus suffered but the sufferings of Jesus Christ
were not enough, so Paul fills them up,
fills them up to the brim by his
suffering.
Is that what he's saying?
Well now let's try and distinguish this.
If Paul was saying that, he would be
contradicting himself over and over again.
Because there is no context in the New
Testament where Paul says anything of that order
anywhere else.
On the contrary, even in this epistle to
the Colossians, Paul will soon be telling the
Colossians, look, he says, you are complete in
Him.
It's a beautiful word that.
All the fullness you need, everything you need,
right up to the full, nothing missing, is
in Him.
You're complete in Him.
Not only that but throughout his ministry he
has been writing to the Romans, if I
were here for a much longer time I
would like to deal with the implications of
a passage such as this and a word
such as this, how Paul says we are
justified by faith apart from the observing of
the law.
Faith in Christ, not our faith so much
as faith in Christ, it's the object of
the faith because God set Christ forth upon
the cross to be our sin bearer and
our Savior.
He died in our stead and is risen
again.
Our faith in Him alone justifies us, takes
away our condemnation, imputes righteousness to us, clothes
us in the very righteousness of Jesus himself
and we are accepted in the beloved one,
justified in Christ alone.
Not one solitary labor of my hand, not
one tear that flows over my cheeks can
add to that savingly.
If I am to be saved it is
because Jesus died for me and nothing I
can do can add to that.
Anything that I put alongside of that by
way of addition is subtraction.
It means I don't know Jesus Christ and
I don't understand His sufferings.
When Paul went to Corinth you remember he
said I was determined not to know anything
among you save Jesus Christ and Him crucified.
Now there was a place to talk about
philosophy and the value of learning and culture
and so forth and of course in one
or two places he does have hints in
those directions but he did not preach these
things.
The thing, the message that he brought to
the Corinthians in their moral quagmire was this,
Jesus Christ and Him crucified.
He puts it later on like this, for
what I received I passed on to you
as of first importance that Christ died for
our sins according to the scriptures and that
He was buried and that He was raised
again on the third day.
Now that's Paul's gospel.
Christ did it all.
He died an atoning death and He finished
salvation.
He wrought redemption.
What does he mean here then?
When he says that he is suffering up
that which is lacking in the sufferings of
the Lord Jesus.
Now in trying to encapsule this, can I
try to put it like this?
In terms of procuring redemption for any sinner,
Jesus Christ has done everything that is necessary
and you can add nothing to it.
That's the tragedy of the self-righteous person.
He's trying to establish a righteousness which in
his estimation or her estimation will add to
the sufferings of the Lord Jesus and on
the basis of the two things together he
or she hopes to be saved.
Now that is not Christian.
You cannot add anything to what Jesus Christ
has done.
But what does this mean then?
What it means in this context is this.
Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.
Jesus Christ is ascended to the right hand
of the Father on high and Jesus Christ
crucified, risen, ascended is the head of His
body, the church.
How are the Colossians, how are the Colossians,
pagan, Gentiles as they were, how are they
going to know that the Christ who allegedly
died for them on Calvary still loves them
and still cares for them?
And if they come to Christ how are
they going to grow in grace?
Who is going to look after them?
How is the mind of Christ to be
revealed to them and the love of Christ
to be expressed?
Paul says, here am I, send me, love
them through me, speak to them through me,
suffer for them through me.
That is what he means.
It is not the sufferings that bring salvation
within the realm of possibility but the sufferings
that carry the message of salvation to the
needy and the sufferings involved in bringing the
babes in Christ toward maturity.
In coming between them and the wolves as
there were in Colossia at this time.
It is the suffering of challenging heresies and
expounding the truth and loving those that are
wayward and going after them into the desert
and bringing them back again into the fold.
That is the suffering.
It is the suffering of bringing the full
salvation of Jesus Christ and declaring it to
men and loving them so that Christ's love
flows through him.
And speaking to them so that Christ's mind
becomes known through him.
Now then, says Paul, in order to get
there, in order to get there, I want
you to notice all this is due to
God.
I had very little to do with it.
I have become its servant, he says, the
church's servant.
The word is diakonos, its servant.
It is sometimes transliterated deacon.
It does not necessarily have that technical sense
here that it has when we speak of
a deacon in the church, but it does
mean a servant.
I have become a servant of the church.
I have made myself a servant of people
like the Colossians.
And they were a pretty difficult lot of
people.
But Paul had made himself their servant, and
this was part of the suffering, of yielding
and submitting to serve a rather difficult people.
Not only that, he says, God has commissioned
me.
I have become its servant according to the
commission of God.
The word is oikonomion, and it is made
up of two words, oikos and nomion.
Oikos is house, nomion is law.
House law.
I hope you have a house law in
your home.
If you don't, it will get a little
bit odd by and by if there is
no house law.
God has a house law among his people,
and one of the rules of the family
is this.
The children must suffer to share the wealth
of the family, the riches of the family,
and the benefits of the family, the privileges
of the family with other people.
Suffer to give, not to get.
We expect our children to suffer in order
to bring more of the riches of the
world into our home.
God's rule of the family, God's family law
is that all the children of the family
suffer to share the riches of the home
with a vast teeming world of needy lost
men and women.
It is all so different.
Here the apostle Paul recognized himself as singularly
called, not just as an illustration of a
general principle, because Ananias had gone to him,
or rather Ananias had been sent to him
by the Lord.
This is the conversation that went on between
Ananias and the Lord when Paul was still
in a trance.
The Lord said to Ananias, go.
Ananias didn't want to go to Saul.
This man is my chosen instrument.
What for?
To carry my name before the Gentiles and
their kings and before the people of Israel.
I will show him how much he must
suffer for my name.
I will show him how much he must
suffer for my name.
It's very significant.
Pardon me for bringing it in.
But that very word, carry my name or
bear my name, is the very word that
we encounter in Galatians 6.17 where Paul
says, I bear in my body the brands
of the Lord Jesus Christ.
What are you saying Paul?
This, I'm carrying the name of my God
to the uttermost parts of the earth, and
the proof of it is in my bones,
in my wheels, in my wounds, on my
back, and wherever I am, as well as
in my spirit.
By my sufferings, I'm declaring that he is
Lord and he is Savior, and I'm his
prisoner and his child.
Paul embraced his suffering as a facet of
his Christian experience, and the last thing to
which I can only refer, Paul was experiencing
suffering as well as joy in the fulfillment
of that calling in two things, in two
ways.
If you read carefully in the NIV, you
will find these words.
The commission God gave me to present to
you the Word of God in its fullness.
Here was the ministry that was going to
cause him to suffer a lot.
To present the Word of God in its
fullness.
The background to that is this.
The Old Testament is the Word of God,
but it is not the full Word of
God.
God had more to say than he said
clearly in the Old Testament.
But you see, when people had discovered that
the Word of God was the Word of
God in the Old Testament, they got so
attached to the Old Testament they couldn't envisage
of anybody adding anything.
God himself must not add anything to the
Word that he has written.
Now this is conservatism at its worst, which
could not see that God had more to
say than he had said when Malachi was
completed.
Paul says here there were certain mysteries hidden
from before the foundations of the world which
God had not said.
He had hinted at them in some of
the prophets, but he hadn't said them clearly.
Now he says he has revealed them to
his apostles and his holy prophets, and it
is given for me to declare the full
message, he says.
But you see, people don't like the full
message of anything, even of Christianity.
This is part of the rub.
Most of us like some part of Christianity.
And we can get along with that part
that we like, and we want everybody else
to acknowledge that and forget the others.
But the fact of the matter is this,
there is a wholeness about Christianity.
It adds to the Old Testament something and
it brings out something that was only latent
in the Old Testament.
And what it does bring out particularly is
this, of course, that the Gentiles are to
be fellow heirs with the Jews in the
very best that God has to give to
the lost among men.
This is a very difficult and a dangerous
thing to say.
You imagine going to a crowd of Pharisees
and Sadducees and the ancient Jews as Jesus
himself preached to them and say, and say,
look, I have grace and I have power
and I have a message that is going
to elevate the most outrageous Gentile so that
the middle wall of partition between you is
broken down and he and you become not
Jew and Gentile in one partnership but a
new creation.
Now it is dangerous to talk like that.
You know it is dangerous to talk like
that still.
And sometimes even in evangelical congregations.
It is dangerous to talk about the middle
wall of partition broken down between Jew and
Gentile so that it is the new man
in Christ that God is looking after and
looking for.
It is dangerous.
You will have a sword in your side.
You will have tongues wagging.
You will have all kinds of criticism.
Paul had to go out and declare what
God had fully and finally revealed, the whole
truth, the gospel in its fullness, not a
part of it.
Then the other thing is this.
Along with that, following from that, to them
that is to the saints, God has chosen
to make known among the Gentiles, the saints
among the Gentiles, the glorious riches of the
mystery which is Christ in you, the hope
of glory.
Now my friends, I really am at a
standstill.
I don't know how to put this just
briefly.
What Paul is saying is this.
When God came down among his ancient people,
he became tabernacled in one form or another.
Ultimately he caused the tent in the wilderness
to be erected.
Then the temple in Jerusalem.
And when God moved in, the great Shekinah
glory filled the place so that you knew
that God dwelt there.
Marvelous.
But God did something more than that.
God tabernacled in Messiah Jesus.
God built the structure of his own tabernacle
in the confines of Mary's womb by the
Holy Ghost.
And he erected for himself a tabernacle of
flesh and he moved in and he dwelt
in him.
And Paul says that all the fullness of
God was caused to dwell in him in
body form.
Now he says, God has done all that,
but listen, God is doing something beyond that
now.
What is he doing?
Christ, in whom all the fullness of the
Godhead resided and resides, is dwelling in the
hearts of Gentiles.
Surely that can't be true.
Gentiles in a little town like Colossae that
was booming industrially a little time ago, but
is now on the way down and on
the way off the map.
And today there's very little to be said
about it.
Yeah.
God, God is coming to dwell in all
the fullness and plenitude of his grace in
the hearts of Colossian Gentile pagans.
Jesus is moving in by his spirit to
dwell in their hearts, to dwell in their
lives.
And that means this.
They too have the hope of the glory
of God.
One day the body of the flesh, one
day the bodies of those Gentile Christians in
distant Colossae shall know something of the fullness
of the Shekinah when they will receive a
new body.
This will be transformed according to our Lord's
glorious body and the body will be filled.
The temple will be filled with the glory
of God.
Have you got the picture?
Now what's all this got to say to
us this morning?
Well, my friends, it has this to say
for us.
First of all, as we come to the
table of our Lord, let's leave behind us
all thoughts of an easygoing Christianity.
A cross is at the heart of it.
And you and I cannot eat these elements
and drink of the cup today if we
haven't come to terms with that.
But more than that, we need to see
that the pattern for us is to turn
both sorrow and joy so that they drive
us out for God, out for God, and
for others.
Send us further.
Enable us to do more for God and
his church.
Have you, as the Apostle Paul was, have
you been given as a servant to the
church of Jesus Christ?
Every true member has.
Are you living up to it?
But then this, and with this I must
close.
Let us be sure we represent the whole
truth in its integrity, in its totality, and
not just little fragments of the truth by
means of which we can become very popular,
very popular.
If we preach what people want to hear,
and if we say it in the way
people want us to say it, and if
we toe the line to the desires of
fallen human nature and carnal Christians, you and
I can yet be popular.
You've got to bring your popularity to the
cross of Christ.
That's the call of these elements today, and
that's the call of this word today, and
I believe therefore that's the call of the
Spirit of God to your heart and mine.
Men and women, I beseech you by the
mercies of God that you present your bodies
a living sacrifice.
Let us pray.
Our Heavenly Father, when we measure ourselves by
one another, we so often evade much of
the just sense of sorrow and criticism that
might be leveled at us, the sense of
sorrow coming from such criticism as might be
leveled at us, that when we come to
your Word and see ourselves in the light
of the cross and of the death of
your Son and of your purpose for us
who are related to him by faith and
allegiance, and when we even compare ourselves with
his apostles, who were frail, fallible men in
their natural condition, just like ourselves, save that
they had the mighty fullness of the Spirit
to enable them to be what they were
called to be.
When we compare ourselves with them, we recognize
the multiplicity of our blemishes, and we need
your forgiveness.
Forgive us, O Lord, who are before you
today.
Forgive us for our sins.
Times without number we have toyed with your
truth and tried to strike a bargain with
your lordship.
Times without number we have promised and not
delivered the goods.
Times without number we have testified to the
fact that we belong to you as your
servants when we have proceeded only to serve
our own purposes.
O Lord, as you read our hearts and
know our thoughts, grant us now the kind
of sorrow of heart that we need to
have in order that with our whole heart
and mind and soul we may reembrace the
cross and the crucified and recommit ourselves to
you in him.
For whatever you may have ahead for us
as a people and for each of us
as individuals, draw near to us at your
table.
Speak there the same message.
Confirm what you have said from the scriptures
and let the broken bread and the outpoured
wine be most eloquent to every heart before
you today to the everlasting praise of your
holy name.
Amen.