Would you kindly turn with me in your
New Testaments to the letter written by Paul
to the Colossians.
The passage that was read for us by
Alan was read really as a background to
our text.
It is not to be our text in
itself, but it certainly serves as a very
apposite, very appropriate background to the text that
we are going to look at now.
I want to read then from Colossians chapter
1 beginning with verse 28 through to the
third verse in chapter 2.
And again, I'm going to be reading from
the New International Version.
We proclaim him, admonishing and teaching everyone with
all wisdom, so that we may present everyone
perfect in Christ.
To this end I labor, struggling with all
his energy, which so powerfully works in me.
I want you to know how much I
am struggling for you and for those at
Laodicea and for all who have not met
me personally.
My purpose is that they may be encouraged
in heart and united in love so that
they may have the full riches of complete
understanding in order that they may know the
mystery of God, namely Christ, in whom are
hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
May the Spirit of God help us as
we seek to expound this passage and to
appreciate something of its content and apply its
truths and tenets to ourselves.
We come to this passage armed with a
mental picture of Paul rejoicing in the face
of suffering.
We were looking at that last Lord's Day
in the preceding verses.
He is rejoicing in the midst of his
sufferings for the church.
He's rejoicing in his sufferings because he knows
that the sufferings that God has permitted are
good for him personally.
But especially is he rejoicing in those sufferings
because they are the means of bringing God's
grace, the good news in all its fullness
and in all its glory to men and
women wherever he may go.
He was pledged therefore to make known to
the Gentiles to whom he was divinely commissioned
to go.
He was pledged to make known to the
Gentiles the riches of the message of Messiah.
And as we were concluding our exposition of
the preceding passage, last Lord's Day, we came
to that climactic word.
It can all be summed up in this
way.
Christ the Messiah in you.
And Christ the Messiah being in you is
nothing less than the hope in you of
glory in him.
Christ in you the hope of glory.
Now to have said to the Gentiles in
distant Colossae that Christ was among them, that
Messiah was among them would have been wonderful.
But the apostle's message goes well beyond that.
He does not simply proclaim a Messiah among
Gentiles as he is among Jews.
But Christ in you, tabernacling in your hearts,
in your bodies which are the temple of
the Holy Ghost, living in you and thereby
becoming the hope of nothing short of the
most amazing benefit that was held out to
the ancient people in the Old Testament.
The same hope is held out to us
in the New Testament which is the hope
of glory.
Now beginning with verse 28, Paul makes our
thoughts to converge almost exclusively on Christ whose
personal work for and whose indwelling of his
people he has already referred to.
Now this is how he brings it.
Let me read my text again or the
first part of it.
We proclaim him.
I've talked about him.
I've said this about him and that about
him.
Now says Paul, we proclaim him.
Actually I prefer the King James and the
Revised Standard Version here.
Him we proclaim and the him comes first.
It is he that we proclaim.
That's how Paul wrote it.
As if to say all eyes on him,
away from your deified men, be they good,
be they evil, away from your leaders, away
from everybody, all eyes converge on one, him.
He's the one we preach.
He's the one we announce.
He and he alone is the one whom
we proclaim.
And then he goes on to say, to
this end I labor, struggling with all his
energy which so powerfully works in me.
Now you will notice immediately that the thought
of perseverance continues here from the last chapter.
I cannot omit this.
It's so important.
Paul says that there are so many blessings
for you in Christ.
Go back to verses 23 and 24.
Then he hangs it all upon an if.
If you continue in the faith and become
grounded and settled in it and be not
moved away from the gospel.
In other words, what he's saying is perseverance
in grace is part of Christian experience.
If you really receive eternal life through Christ
by the Spirit, if Christ is dwelling in
you, then you have eternal life.
Not life for a month, nor life for
a year, nor life for 10 years, nor
life for the other side of the grave
any more than for this side of the
grave, but eternal life.
That means this.
If I have that life, I will keep
on going on by the grace of the
indwelling Christ.
And what we have here again is Paul
showing us how he is persevering.
Now that's not his subject.
But indirectly he lets us see how he,
the apostle, is going on persevering in the
grace which is in Christ.
Directly he tells us how first of all
the Colossians and how thereafter all the people
of God may go on and on toward
the maturity which he is referring to here.
Now there are three things I want to
speak to.
Will you forgive me for sipping a little
water this morning?
I thought I was going to get through
this winter without a cold, but I didn't.
Thank you.
Now there are three things I want to
refer to this morning.
One, Paul's resolution, or if you like, Paul's
perseverance.
Paul's resolution and the subject of his preaching.
I'll refer to it and therefore we can
be very brief here.
We proclaim him.
Him we proclaim.
Counseling and teaching everyone in all wisdom.
Now you notice what he's doing.
First of all he specifies the one solitary
subject of the proclamation.
Him.
Christ.
And then he says we use all the
capacity that God has given to us in
order to do that with all counseling and
teaching.
With all our capacity for counseling, and that
means warning sometimes and wooing at other times,
and enlarging your field of knowledge and your
horizons.
Using all the ability that God has given
us to educate you and to add more
and more to your knowledge and so forth.
We use everything that God has given us
to do this one thing, to proclaim him.
Now blessed is that man.
Blessed is that parent.
Blessed is that Sunday school teacher.
Blessed is that minister, that pastor who can
honestly say he's doing that.
Out of his Roman prison house comes this
remarkable statement of Paul's undaunted and unqualified confidence
in Jesus Christ that enabled him to say
this.
Because confidence preceded consecration.
A confidence that refused to be silent concerning
our Lord under any circumstances whatsoever.
Now the scene in Paul's life, the scene
of Paul's preaching may change from public forum
to a prison cell as it has here.
From Jerusalem to Athens to Rome.
From Jew to Gentile, from Greek to Barbarian.
But wherever he was he proclaimed the one
and the same message, Christ the hope of
glory.
Due to his understanding of the uniqueness of
the person of our Lord, and the fullness
of the work accomplished by him for our
redemption, and its totality and adequacy, Christ preached
one person, none other, Christ and Christ alone.
In short, Christ and Christ alone was the
sum total of his ministry.
Now this planned, this deliberate exclusiveness is something
which we may find somewhat challenging in our
pluralistic society.
And in an atmosphere where we tend to
see less and less distinction between truth and
error, between right and wrong.
In our world of moral indifferentism and spiritual
indifferentism, this exclusive note seems to be representative
either of a thoroughgoing ignorance or of a
jaundiced mind.
And people will charge us Christians of that.
Your mind is jaundiced.
You can't see the good in this religion
or in that philosophy or whatever.
Well, I suggest to you it takes a
real jaundiced mind to approach the Apostle Paul
and challenge him with being ignorant.
And the person who dares do that with
the facts before him is a very daring
person.
For here was a gigantic mind and intellect.
Here was a man whose heart nevertheless was
as big as his intellect.
He was prepared to die for the good
of men.
Neither was he prejudiced.
You read honestly the writings of the Apostle
Paul and what you see here is a
man emerging out of the prison house of
prejudice, national prejudice, personal prejudices, family prejudices, social
prejudices of all kinds into the liberty which
is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
But the fact of the matter is this.
He had come along that way into such
a certain knowledge of the glories of the
incarnate Christ that his life was now revolving
entirely exclusively around proclaiming him in prison or
in pulpit, in Jerusalem or in Rome or
in Athens or anywhere else.
To me said he to live as Christ,
Paul's resolution and the subject of his preaching.
And the second main thing that we notice
here is Paul's resolution and the specification of
his purpose.
Preaching was not the end.
Preaching was a means to an end.
Proclaiming Christ was a means toward a goal.
What was that goal?
We see Paul very busy by word of
mouth preaching, by delegated emissaries calling men around
him like Silas and Timotheus and others and
making them his emissaries.
And when he leaves a place he leaves
them behind and he tells them what to
do and how to teach and how to
set the churches are going and so forth.
Paul what's the matter with you?
Why are you doing all this?
Why are you in big business of this
kind?
I mean spiritual business.
And by your letters.
Why do you insist on writing letters from
prison?
What's it all for?
What are you aiming at?
Now I want you to notice two things.
Let me just read verses 28, the second
part of 28 and 29 again.
So that we may present everyone perfect in
Christ.
To this end I labor, struggling with all
his energy which so powerfully works in me.
Now may the spirit of God bring this
home to us.
I cannot do it.
Paul's eye is what he would call the
day of presentation.
Did you get it?
So that we may present everyone perfect in
Christ.
The day of presentation.
This subject of course was previously introduced way
back in in verse 22.
Colossians 1 22 where it reads like this.
But now he says he that is Christ
has reconciled, I'm sorry God has reconciled you
by Christ's physical body through death to present
you wholly in his sight without blemish and
free from accusation.
Now what's the reference to?
Well the reference is to quote one of
the terms used by Mr. McLeod here and
is commonly used.
The reference is clearly to an eschatological event.
An event that is to come at the
end time when our Lord Jesus Christ returns
in glory to wrap up the affairs of
the universe or if you like to consummate
what he's already commenced.
To bring to an end and to a
close and to a climax what is already
going on because he came into the world
and has sent the Holy Spirit to take
his place.
He's coming back sometime within the scheme of
things away there in that eschatological future.
Men and women will be able to present
to the Lord Jesus Christ the fruit of
their labors.
You and I will be examined as to
what we've done with our lives.
With the gifts God has given us.
With everything that he has entrusted to us.
Our material well-being.
Our physical strengths.
Our talents as we speak of them and
so forth.
And we shall be given the opportunity of
presenting to him the fruit of our labors.
And Paul was thrilled about it.
Now you may not be as thrilled.
I may not.
Paul was.
Parents will present their children.
Grandparents will present their children and their grandchildren
in many cases.
Many of us were prayed for and brought
in the kingdom by grandparents and great-grandparents
that hardly saw us for longer than a
day or two in the flesh.
But they prayed for us and interceded for
us and we are the fruit of their
labors and they will be presented the day
of presentation.
You know what thrills me is this that
our Lord Jesus seemed to look forward to
this day too.
I know the apostles did.
Paul refers to it quite often.
In 2 Corinthians 11-2, Philippians 1-10
-2-26, 1 Thessalonians 2-19-20, 1
John 2-28 and in other places.
You have the same excitement in the hearts
of the apostles about this day of presentation.
But what thrills me is that Jesus himself
is understood by Paul at any rate as
having had a yearning to see that day.
You get that in Ephesians 5-25-27.
Let me read.
Husband, says Paul, love your wives just as
Christ loved the church and gave himself up
for her to make her holy, cleansing her
by the washing with water through the word.
What for?
Ah, here it is.
To present her to himself as a radiant
church, the concept of glory, a flashingly magnificent
church, a radiant church without stain, no spots
of sin or evil or wrinkle.
You ladies, you're afraid of wrinkles.
I don't know that we men are, but
no wrinkle without stain or wrinkle or blemish,
but holy and blameless.
So says Paul, even our Lord Jesus Christ
has his heart set on that day when
he will present to himself.
He will receive the present from you, and
then the present you give him, he will
take to be his own, his bride.
And he's looking forward to it.
Here then is something that every servant of
God should bear in mind.
There is to be a day when we
shall have the opportunity of presenting the fruit
of our labors to our blessed Lord Jesus
Christ.
I trust none of us will be found
that day discomfited like the man who had
hidden his talent and hoped that the almighty
God would have worked a miracle somehow or
other in order to bring something about without
his effort.
Let me just mention one thing in passing.
You see, Paul is full of this, and
I would have liked to deal with it
as a subject.
For example, in 2 Corinthians 11, I've referred
to this in passing.
In verse 2, he says this to the
Corinthians.
Now you remember the Corinthians.
They were rebellious, and they were not easy
to grow up.
They were being very immature, some of them
intellectually, all of them spiritually, many of them
morally.
They just were not growing up.
And then Paul, in writing to them in
2 Corinthians 11, verse 2, says this.
You know, he says, I am jealous for
you with a godly jealousy.
I promised you to one husband, to Christ,
so that I might present you as a
pure virgin to him.
What a concept of ministry.
Here is Paul bringing the Corinthians to Christ.
What image did he have in his mind?
Well, here's one of them.
He thought of every Corinthian individual, and of
the Corinthian church in particular, as a girl
won to the beloved bridegroom of our souls.
And he thought of winning the girl, and
cleansing her from all the evils of the
world, and all the spots and taints of
sin, and presenting her at last to the
Lord Jesus as his and his only.
And he would keep the church, you see,
pure for him.
A girl told me not so long ago,
in my own office here, it's the big
battle of my life, to keep my body
and my spirit pure.
To present myself at last to Jesus Christ.
You know anything of that concern?
To present yourself pure.
Paul was concerned to present the church and
every Christian image pure.
The point is, you see, Paul saw the
whole of the present in the light of
the future.
Not until our whole life assumes such an
intimate relationship to the will of God, and
we have learned to see our present activity
in the light of future realities, shall we
be able to hold the affairs of this
present life in perspective.
This present life can only be properly understood
against the backdrop of eternity.
Now you take eternity out of the picture,
and you trivialize everything.
But you remember the eternal things.
You remember this day of presentation.
You remember that we must all stand before
the beamer, the judgment seat of Christ.
Just remember that.
It'll make a world of difference to Monday
morning.
It'll transform the whole of life.
The day of presentation.
But now notice, Paul adds to that.
He's thinking of in terms of reasons now
for his behavior, for submitting to suffering and
persevering in the proclamation of Christ.
He's adding this to it.
He refers to the day of perfection, so
that we may present everyone perfect in Christ.
Of course, there is perfection and perfection.
The perfection of a newborn baby is one
thing.
Ah, don't let's minimize it.
If an expectant mother has had any doubt
as to whether her baby will be whole,
then you know what a thrill it is
to look at those teeny little fingers and
see that they're all there, and they're all
shapely, and see the little ears and the
little toes, and see that everything is there
just as it ought to be.
Don't let us minimize the perfection of the
newborn babe.
That's a marvelous miracle of God.
It should make us rejoice and worship.
But there's a world of difference between the
perfection of the newborn babe and the perfection
of the athlete in top form.
A Mr. Universe, whose biceps have all been
employed, and he's got control of every muscle
in his body, and he knows how to
turn and how to stand.
He knows how to control everything within his
body.
Have you seen him?
Take a good look at him.
Not for his physical magnificence, primarily, but for
some other reason, the spiritual that lies behind
it.
Our Lord Jesus Christ expects us men and
women to have control of ourselves, as a
man like that has control of his muscles.
Now, it is more than probable that what
Paul has here in his thinking is the
ultimate maturity of a man fully grown, a
man grown up to become what God meant
him to be when he made him, and
when he redeemed him.
A man in whom the grace of God
has matured to glory, and a man in
whom all the gifts of God have become
so mature that they've functioned, and he can
say of them, as he said of his
own son Jesus Christ, I am well pleased.
That's glory.
Paul speaks, you remember, in the complimentary passage
to Colossians 2, in Ephesians 4, he refers
to growing up to the fullness of the
stature of Christ.
Now, that's what we have here.
The day of presentation, presenting men and women
who are our converts, who are our spiritual
children, whom God has put in our care
to bring up from childhood to maturity, presenting
them mature.
Now, I want you to notice this.
The sphere within which such perfection will be
found is couched in the words, in Christ.
All the perfection of which Paul speaks is
a perfection which is to be found and
which is to be gained, which is to
be acquired in Christ, not outside of Christ.
And when we go on to verses 6
and 7 and 8 in chapter 2, he'll
be saying the same thing.
He'll be talking about settling down in Christ
and letting your roots get into Christ.
You don't need to go outside of Christ.
Christ is all.
That's the point.
But now, I'm not going on there this
morning, and I think I'll be stealing Mr.
McLeod's passage if I were to try to
do it.
The sphere within which such perfection will be
found is couched in these words, in Christ,
in Christ.
This is the great doctrine of the mystical
union of Christ and his church, the head
and the body.
That one tiny preposition, in with reference to
Christ, has reference to the believer's peculiar relationship
to our Lord Jesus.
You see, the people of Jesus Christ don't
belong to him like bricks.
I don't know, I don't suppose we've got
many bricks in these walls.
There are stones there.
But one stone upon another, that's not the
picture, even though that is used in the
Bible of the relationship of Christian to another.
We are bricks in the stone, in the
wall, or stones in the wall.
That's found in 1 Peter 2.
But yet, that's not the one that Paul
has here.
There's a more intimate picture of our relationship
to Jesus Christ than that, than being bricks
in the one wall of which he is
the chief cornerstone.
Neither is it simply a matter of being
the disciples of one teacher, where he is
in the center of us and we are
gathered around him, or he is in a
rostrum like this and we are in front
of him.
That's not primarily the relationship.
That's not the, certainly not the deepest, the
most intimate relationship between Jesus Christ and his
people.
There is a different one.
Christ's redeemed people are in him like the
fish are in the sea, like the bird
is in the sky.
He is our sphere.
In him we live and move and have
our being.
When the Holy Spirit took us out of
the Adamic stem and brought us into Christ,
that moment we began to live.
We were born again.
And now in Christ we live, in Christ
we move, in Christ we have the beginning
of our salvation, in Christ we have the
end of our salvation, in Christ we have
all.
That's the message.
So you see, all the perfection of which
the apostle has in mind here is a
perfection that is first found in Christ and
becomes ours in virtue of our relationship to
Christ.
He is our righteousness.
He is our wisdom.
He is our sanctification.
He is our redemption.
There's nothing else left for him to be.
Hallelujah.
He is everything.
Now I'll correct a possible false understanding of
that in a moment, but he is, let
us unequivocally say that, our perfection is not
in what I do as separated from Christ
for one moment.
Our perfection is that which he imputes to
us and imparts to us by his Spirit
and by his indwelling.
It is all his.
So that when we stand at last in
the presence of the Father, we'll have to
say, Father, it was all his.
And because his, it was yours.
It was all of grace.
And every mouth will be stopped from boasting
in him.
There'll not be a single boaster there save
in him.
So if you're a boaster, you better stop
it now and learn the lesson.
The only object of boasting in the eternal
city is the Father and the Son by
the Spirit.
Now I must say one other word here.
The scope of the anticipated perfection.
That we may present everyone perfect in Christ.
You see this little clique that had come
into Colossae.
They used this word perfection very much, but
with them it was something different.
They pretended that they had a secret.
You know, they are Christians in Colossae already,
but we can make them better Christians if
only they listen to what we've got to
say.
We've got a little prescription of our own.
Come and join us in our little corner.
Come and join our little group.
Come and study with us.
Come and pray with us.
And we've got a prescription.
We'll give you something that will help you
to grow up.
And it'll be ours exclusively.
There was an exclusiveness about it that severed
them from the body of Christ.
Even when they were right theologically.
They were not right theologically.
But even if they were right theologically, there
was something wrong here.
They didn't come nearer to the body of
Christ.
They went further away.
They split.
But now notice, you see, they would say,
yes, yes, there's perfection coming, but only for
our little group that have accepted our prescription
and follow us.
We have many people like that in the
world.
I could take you around many churches in
Belfast this morning that talk about perfection, but
only for our little group.
God have mercy on them and on us.
Listen to Paul's message, will you please?
That I may present everyone perfect in Christ.
Of course, he's talking about every believer.
The least believer, the unloveliest believer, the most
immature believer, the fellow that had a very
bad start, the chap who came into this
church as a homosexual and couldn't acknowledge his
sin, and then at last did and began
to struggle, and was afraid to sit to
some of you good people in the congregation
unless you knew who he was, but is
struggling to victory.
I tell you, he will be made perfect
in Christ as you and I will in
Christ.
That's the message.
There is a perfection, you see, in Christ.
Not because of your pedigree, not arising even
because of your past habits, but it comes
to you in virtue of being a man
or a woman in Christ.
And as Mary Magdalene from the one side
of the sexual order of things will be
there, so I believe there will be some
of these people there by the grace of
God and the compassion of his servants.
But I must hurry.
Now, for those of you who are really
studying this book, and it's so encouraging to
find there are, can I tell you that
Paul returns in verses two and three of
the second chapter to repeat the purpose of
his resolute and painstaking service in these words.
Well, you can see the words, I don't
need to mention them, but I want you
to notice now that Paul's eye there is
differently placed.
What I've already been referring to is the
ultimate, the goal, the reason why he's doing
this ultimately, the presentation of all men perfect
in Christ, nothing less.
But now here's a more immediate goal.
My purpose is that they may be encouraged
in heart.
Oh, can you hear the sympathy of this
man coming through?
Encouraged in heart, united in love so that
they may have full riches of complete understanding
in order that they may know the mystery
of God, namely Christ, in whom are hidden
all the treasures and wisdom of knowledge.
Now, I want you to notice three things
there.
I can't deal with them, but I must
refer to them.
We've looked at the ultimate end in view.
How are we going to get to the
ultimate end?
Well, now, Paul tells us three things.
One, that they may be encouraged in heart.
You ask me, he says, why I'm writing
letters in prison?
Because there are Christians in Colossae that need
to be encouraged in heart.
You know, the word encouraged here means it
comes from the Greek underlying the term parakletos,
or the verb in this case.
Paraklet means one who's come alongside someone to
take his case, to plead for him, to
stand with him, to strengthen him, to encourage
him.
Paul says, I'm in prison, right enough, but
there are saints in difficulty in Colossae.
And I want those saints in Colossae that
I've never seen with my eyes to know
that I, as best I can, I'm standing
with them.
I'm a paraklete alongside of them.
And that's the way I'm going to bring
them to glory.
That's one thing I've got to do.
Brothers and sisters, you know, we talk about
gifts.
If only we took the Bible seriously, you
and I would be very, very busy.
If you want to do one basic thing
to bring men and women, boys and girls,
young men and maiden, during this terribly tempting
epoch in church history, if you want to
bring them to glory, encourage them.
Be a paraklete.
Stand alongside them.
Give them a little shove forward now and
again.
Give them a pat on the back occasionally.
Somehow or other, help them to go on.
Don't be so critical.
Give them a little shove every now and
again and let them know that you're glad
to see them on the way to Zion.
Be a paraklete with a small p.
That's the first thing.
It sounds so terribly simple, I tell you.
Sounds simple, it may be, but it has
the most far-reaching consequences.
The second thing is that they may be
united in love.
Now, it would seem that the concept here
is of love knitting people together.
There are different kinds of love, but even
within the experience of agape love, you can
have a kind of detachment.
Paul is speaking here about love knitting us
together, that really there is a tear if
we're apart.
Do you know anything of that?
Where it pains to be apart from the
saints.
If you're not present in the house of
the Lord, if you're not present in prayer,
if you don't see so and so, you
feel as if you've been torn asunder.
Do you know anything of that?
In order for the church at Colossae to
meet the challenge of the heretics and to
be brought forward towards this perfection that Paul
has in mind, he says, they need to
be knit together in love.
They've got agape, but they need to be
knit, come closer together.
And then thirdly, in order that they may
know all the mystery of God, namely, I'm
glad he has that in, namely Christ, in
whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom
and of knowledge.
In other words, says Paul, after these other
two things that I've mentioned, then the discipline
is a discipline of coming to know God
in Christ better and better, more and more,
day after day, week after week, month after
month, year after year, until he comes or
calls.
Have you got the picture?
That's the way Paul would bring his people
to that great day of presentation when they
will be found perfect in Christ.
Now then I'm summarizing this.
Paul, the last thing, Paul's resolution and the
supply of power to achieve the end in
view.
To this end I labor, struggling with all
his energy, which so powerfully works in me.
Now this is a passage, this is a
verse actually that may take people by surprise
and well, it may.
It'll serve to show how very many false
emphases there are abroad.
Look at the struggle of the servant here.
Paul is second to none in his stress
upon the adequacy of God.
This is the man that speaks of being
more than conquerors through him that loved us.
And you look at the context in Romans
8 where he says that.
Even so, he does not on that account
minimize the reality of human struggle involved in
suffering.
In Paul's mind, the availability and experience of
God's power did not cancel the necessity, nor
the grim reality of the human struggle to
help one another and to sanctify our own
lives and to grow in the grace and
the knowledge of the Lord Jesus.
In verse 29 and in verse 1 of
chapter 2, there are two words that he
uses.
Now one word, he has it in verse
29, the word I struggle.
I'm not, I don't quite, I think in
the KJV it says I labor.
That's right, I labor.
I struggle.
It's the very word that Paul uses in
1 Corinthians 4 and in 1 Thessalonians 2
of the way he was under pressure physically
when he had to work for his living
in order to be an evangelist or a
teacher.
You remember there were times when he wouldn't
allow people to provide for him.
He says I have every right to do
that.
If I'm giving you my spiritual, my spiritual
gifts and placing them at your disposal, I
have a right that you should place your
material gifts at my disposal.
But if I allowed you to do that,
he says, some of you would brag and
some of you would be proud and some
of you would do injustice to the gospel
because of that.
Therefore, he says, I don't want you to
support me.
I'll go without your support.
But then he says, oh, I had to
labor.
Copio is the word.
And it means real struggle.
When after preaching, after teaching, after house to
house visiting, at any time he could, he
was tent making.
But the point is, you see, the struggle
was on.
The body was bearing and wearing out.
And he uses that very word here about
his spiritual ministry.
Mr. McLeod's question to the boys, what does
a minister do?
I can understand some people.
In sheer ignorance, thinking that he only stands
in the pulpit once or twice a week
and opens his mouth and may tell you,
my friends, if it is true that we
are the servants of the Lord, there will
be a striving.
It has to be if we are really
his servants and it's a very toiling effort.
In verse 29, again, he uses the word
translated striving.
And he has a noun coming from it
in verse one of chapter two, agon.
The word is the word contest.
It always or generally comes from the games.
Literally you would translate that part in verse
two in this way, how great a struggle
I am having for you.
Now I'm saying this, you see, because there
are some Christians whose view of sanctification is
that there is no struggle.
And sanctification means that you've got out of
every struggle and you just go with it
and the Holy Spirit just carries you along
and you do nothing at all.
Let go, let God.
Listen, my friend, Paul blatantly, absolutely contradicts it
here in one place, but in many other
places too.
He says, I'm struggling and I feel the
struggle.
It's a burden I'm wearing out and I've
got to do it and I mean to
do it.
God's power in Christ does not make it
less necessary for Christ's body to suffer to
do his will.
But there is nevertheless a might, a strength
for the struggle to this end.
I labor struggling now notice here it is.
I can't stay with it with all his
energy, which so powerfully works in me.
The point I want you to know is
this, as Paul was struggling, not to save
him from struggling, as Paul was struggling to
do the will of God, so the mighty
power of God came upon him.
And he said, that power is working mightily
in me to do this very thing in
the midst of my striving.
I'm receiving power.
I'm being charged.
I'm being made stronger than the strong.
I can make 10,000 to fly.
I can do all things through Christ who
strengthens me.
I am weak, yet I am strong.
I'm cast down, but I stand up.
Men and women, this is something of the
invincibility of a man of God, armed in
the power of God and involved in the
work of God.
Do we know anything about it?
And commensurate with a struggle going on simultaneously
with a struggle is this, the release of
the divine power so that in the midst
of it, we are able to achieve.
Keep our eyes on the goal.
And as we keep our eyes on the
goal, God is working his purposes out as
year succeeds to year.
And in his own glorious time, the most
immature babe in Christ will be brought into
the fullness of the stature of his blessed
law.
Oh, that the spirit of God would help
us this morning gathered here to have something
of this spirit of dedication, something of this
understanding where and how to expect the power
of God in us.
And may he lead us on in such
a manner that those whom he is enabling
us to minister to, be it a little
group here or a little group there, be
it those in the home or elsewhere or
in the church, that we may be able
under the anointing of the indwelling spirit, despite
the striving and the struggling, which is enormous,
that we may be enabled to carry on
to the end of the road and thus
please him, our Lord and our master.
Let us pray.
Heavenly Father, let your blessing rest upon your
word.
We are challenged that we are such superficial
readers.
Those of us in the ministry have to
acknowledge, oh Lord, that we so often gloss
over these great utterances of holy writ.
And we excuse ourselves oftentimes from the disciplines
involved in fully and adequately expounding them.
And perhaps your people share in our spirit.
Forgive us, we pray, but give us a
new heart and a new mind that we
may follow in the footmarks of the apostle
who himself walked in the footsteps of his
Lord.
And teach us, if needs be, to spend
and be spent, our joy to do the
Father's will.
And we ask it in the name of
our Savior.
Amen.