Kaleo San Diego Church

INTRODUCTION

God is most glorified when man is most satisfied in Him.

Man is most satisfied when God is most glorified in his life.

These two great truths drive all we do as a young church plant in San Diego.  These truths drive us to a devastating awareness of how little we desire, delight, and are satisfied in God, and yet these truths comfort us as we see that the cry of the human soul, the one thing that we all want, which is to find lasting satisfaction and joy, are only fulfilled in the person of Jesus.  Christ then becomes fully sufficient for all our joy and therefore satisfies the cry of our soul. 

When satisfaction in God is marginalized, one of two errors occur and act as a replacement to that void. One of them is right thinking; you could call that doctrine, and right living, which you could call holiness or purity. When either of these displaces affection, passion, satisfaction, zeal and joy, you are left with, and will usually choose one of two common errors. One is the error of intellectualism, a view that getting right doctrine becomes the barometer of your relationship with God. Or you have legalism which focuses on right living your deeds becomes the measure by which you determine the depth of your relationship with God. One focuses on the head- what you think, the other on the hands- what you do, but neither deal with the heart- how you emotionally respond to God.

As an aside, neither of these two errors need the intrusion of God’s grace to accomplish. Right thinking can be acquired by reading good books, and I’m sure there are quite a few that consider themselves Calvinists and have never tasted of the grace of God, and I’m sure there are many that can muster the outward morality which gives the appearance of piety, much like the Pharisees, yet has no true love and heart consumed connection to the living God.

With these two errors, two additional counter errors are created to avoid falling prey into intellectualism and legalism. On the one hand, some have decided that doctrine and theology is foolish to pursue and so they abandon their studies and develop an anti-intellectual attitude that keeps its distance from the problem of intellectualism. And on the other hand, many have seen the carnage that legalism leaves in its wake, so we create counter problem called antinomianism or we label ourselves as living free in the grace of God. This view attempts to do away with any restrictions, imperatives, or clear commands from scripture so that we don’t return to Puritanic witch hunts.

All four of these views; intellectualism, legalism, anti-intellectualism and anti-legalism, are caused by a vacuum which is left when the affections, passions, emotions and pursuit of satisfaction in Jesus Christ are marginalized, denigrated, ignored, or outright removed from the life of a Christian.

Doctrine serves as the root of the tree, the trunk of it and all its branches are our affections, emotions, desires, delights, in God. As doctrine feeds us, or emotions should grow not diminish, and that growth supplies all that is necessary for the fruit of living which is purity and holiness.

Doctrine feeds our affections and our affections produce fruit. This fruit is sweet because it comes from a healthy tree. Whenever doctrine produces intellectualism, it’s because the doctrine is perverted or misapplied and we end up with arrogance and puffed knowledge about things about Jesus while missing Jesus. Whenever we pursue right living without a heart which savors Christ, we end up with bitter fruit that only produces more bitter fruit.

Satisfaction in God, emotions for God, desires fixed on God, delighting in the glory of God, creates an atmosphere of pleasure fueled by God for His glory and our joy.

This is why we see Paul lay out doctrine before practical living.

As we survey churches through history that have missed this, we find utter devastation.  Heresies, mysticism, open sin, families split and destroyed, wrong views of God, wrong views of man, wrong views of Jesus.  Selfish gain, selfish relationships, selfish ambitions, is the mark as we seek our own self-sufficiency instead of that of Christ’s. 

How do the Christian cults which use the name of Jesus but deny either His humanity or His full deity end up so far from the God-Man?  It’s because they have become concerned with fables or latter day prophets that promise them additional revelation into the God of the Bible.  It’s because they have not loved Jesus but love the institution and control that His name affords them.  It’s because they no longer see Jesus as the one who came to defeat sin, Satan, and death, and instead see Him as someone who needs our good deeds mixed with His righteousness to win our salvation.  It’s because they no longer listen to the simple message of the Gospel and would rather twist and confound the beauty of the good news to make into a load of legalism which we must carry so that God will be impressed and grant us heaven.

In all pseudo-Christian cults, Jesus is the center of their error.  Where He is not seen as all supreme and “all in all,” fully sufficient for joy, fully sufficient for our righteousness before God, fully sufficient to create and uphold the universe, fully sufficient to disarm and crush our enemies, fully royal, fully man, fully God, who fully finished the work that His Father gave Him, fully able to keep us until we come face to face with Him, you will always have dangerous winds blowing through the church attempting to snuff out whatever flame is flickering for the glory of God. 

Not much has changed since the time of the church at Colossae. Though we don’t openly worship gods with names like- Isis, Serapis, Helios, Demeter, and Artemis, they are still as fervently worshipped and we call them money, power, prestige, possessions, work, girlfriend, boyfriend, husband, wife, children, mind, body, and anything else that we give our greatest affections, our greatest energies, and our greatest amount of finances to that stands above our worship of Jesus.

We may not call ourselves Jews or consider ourselves to be proud legalists in the line of the Pharisees or the Essenes of Scripture, yet we preach more about morality than the one who is perfectly moral.  We speak more about keeping the law than we do the One who kept it.  We speak more about what you shouldn’t do than what Christ did.  We speak more about who we should be than who Christ is.  We cut, criticize, ridicule, mock, insult, and condemn all in the name of our religion and all the while we prove by our actions that the good news of Jesus, this scandalous grace found in the Gospel is more foreign than familiar. 

We may not think of ourselves as following in the line of the early Gnostics, yet we still think everything in this world is evil and is going to burn while we dream about our spiritual state.  We still try to find hidden bible codes to warn of the coming Armageddon, the coming anti-Christ, date of Jesus return, the secrets revealed to those bright enough to figure them out.  We act like Da Vinci Code theologians as we blend in our Left Behind series with a touch of conspiracy.

Me may not think we are blending our faith with beliefs from our culture, yet we flirt with compromise as we struggle to find our voice to speak to issues of marriage, the role of man and woman, homosexuality, abortion, economy, stem cell research, social justice, war, and a host of other issues that affect us all and yet many are not sure how God’s word and these concerns relate. 

We are told in our pluralistic society that Christ as King and the only Victor and the only way, is outdated, unkind, unloving, and just plain bigoted.  It is suggested that we open our faith in God to include Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Rastafarianism, and any other “ism” you can think of for the sake of political correctness and religious tolerance.  This pressure is so heavy upon us that I wonder how the next generation will stand. 

We tribalize our faith into a folk belief that mingles something about Christ with the popular thought of our day and culture.  So it was for those Christians at Colossae.

As it relates to angel worship, amulets, witchcraft, crystals, spells, curses, inner knowledge of the spirit world, we really haven’t changed at all.

False philosophy, heresy, and Judaistic legalism are all quite en vogue today.  Different names, same problems, same solution- Christ is Supreme.

My goal for this book is the same as Paul’s- that you would see the supremacy of Christ in all things.  If this book has not caused you to see Jesus in an exalted way, I have failed in my role as a preacher.

As Christians, we often trivialize Jesus by not recognizing His grandeur and His greatness.  In an issue of a magazine called First Things, we find a quote from noted scientist by the name of Charles Misner.  Dr. Misner is talking about Albert Einstein’s view of Christianity and the preachers of the Jesus in his day.  Misner said:

 

I do see the design of the universe as essentially a religious question, that is one should have some kind of respect and awe for the whole business.  Its very magnificence should not be taken for granted.  In fact that is why I think Einstein had so little use for organized religion, although he strikes me basically as a very religious man.  Einstein must have looked at what the Preachers said about God and felt that they were blaspheming.  He had seen much more majesty than they had ever imagined, and they were just not talking about the real thing.  My guess is that the religions that he had run across, did not have the proper respect for the author of the universe.

Einstein died in 1955 and Christians have only continued to trivialize God.  Much of our culture tries to create a manageable deity by turning Jesus into some divine self-help recipe.  Einstein was saying that secular scientists have seen more of the grandeur of God in the world of God than most Christians have seen in the Word of God.  Do we have a proper respect for Jesus as our Creator God?  Do we have a superficial view of Jesus and the world? When scientists hear us talk do they say “they’re just not talking about the real thing?” 

Paul could proclaim the supremacy of Christ as creator because he was amazed at the magnitude of creation.  And today we know far more about this creation than those in Colossae ever imagined.

Think about this; scientists know that light travels 5.87 trillion miles a year--that is a light year.  Our galaxy is about 100 million light years across, which means that our galaxy is about 587 million trillion miles across.  Within the optical range of our best available telescopes today there have been discovered about one million such galaxies.  And in our galaxy there are about 100 billion stars and our sun is a small one.  Our sun is about 6000 degrees centigrade on the cooler surface and it travels about 155 miles per second through the galaxy and will complete its revolution of the galaxy in two hundred thousand years. 

When we study these things and recognize that there is a personal God who spoke this world into being and holds it by the word of His power, His name is Jesus (Col. 1:15-17; Heb. 1:2). Shouldn’t there be a response of awe and an overwhelming shock to our hearts as we trivialize Jesus by sticking Him on a bobble head, by calling Him our homeboy, and by trying to defang Him into a manageable pet deity we call out to whenever we’re in trouble?  Does fear and horror strike us as we think of how little we know, love, trust and obey such a God as this?

Certainly there should be much speaking about this God, much reverence for Him, much thought on the manifold greatness of His worth and power, much prayer for us to sense His presence constantly so that we would be stunned in silence by the limitless power of His glory.

Isaiah hits on this in chapter 40.

Isaiah 40:25-26 "To whom then will you liken Me That I would be his equal?" says the Holy One.  26 Lift up your eyes on high And see who has created these stars, The One who leads forth their host by number, He calls them all by name; Because of the greatness of His might and the strength of His power, Not one of them is missing.

Not only did God create them, He knows their number and He knows their name.  Every star has a name and a number given to them by their Creator.  The winds, the waves, the stars, obey Jesus. 

Einstein felt some of this and felt that the creatures who said they knew Him just didn’t think or talk like this.

The majesty, the supremacy, and the glory of Christ should be the passion of our life as we are consumed with this kind of Jesus.

Paul is the author of this letter and this magnificent and supreme Jesus that holds the world together by His own power. This is the Jesus that Paul met in person on the road to Damascus.  Let’s read.

Paul

Conversion of the author

Acts 9:1-16  Now Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest,  2 and asked for letters from him to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the Way, both men and women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.  3 As he was traveling, it happened that he was approaching Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him; 4 and he fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?"  5 And he said, "Who are You, Lord?" And He said, "I am Jesus whom you are persecuting,  6 but get up and enter the city, and it will be told you what you must do."  7 The men who traveled with him stood speechless, hearing the voice but seeing no one.  8 Saul got up from the ground, and though his eyes were open, he could see nothing; and leading him by the hand, they brought him into Damascus.  9 And he was three days without sight, and neither ate nor drank.  10 Now there was a disciple at Damascus named Ananias; and the Lord said to him in a vision, "Ananias." And he said, "Here I am, Lord."  11 And the Lord said to him, "Get up and go to the street called Straight, and inquire at the house of Judas for a man from Tarsus named Saul, for he is praying,  12 and he has seen in a vision a man named Ananias come in and lay his hands on him, so that he might regain his sight."  13 But Ananias answered, "Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much harm he did to Your saints at Jerusalem;  14 and here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who call on Your name."  15 But the Lord said to him, "Go, for he is a chosen instrument of Mine, to bear My name before the Gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel;  16 for I will show him how much he must suffer for My name's sake."

Did the promise of Jesus come true and did Paul suffer for His name’s sake, in other words, for His glory?  Turn to 2 Corinthians 11:22.

2 Corinthians 11:22-30 Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they descendants of Abraham? So am I.  23 Are they servants of Christ?--I speak as if insane--I more so; in far more labors, in far more imprisonments, beaten times without number, often in danger of death.  24 Five times I received from the Jews thirty-nine lashes.  25 Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, a night and a day I have spent in the deep.  26 I have been on frequent journeys, in dangers from rivers, dangers from robbers, dangers from my countrymen, dangers from the Gentiles, dangers in the city, dangers in the wilderness, dangers on the sea, dangers among false brethren;  27 I have been in labor and hardship, through many sleepless nights, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure.  28 Apart from such external things, there is the daily pressure on me of concern for all the churches.  29 Who is weak without my being weak? Who is led into sin without my intense concern?  30 If I have to boast, I will boast of what pertains to my weakness.

Here Paul sits writing this letter from prison in Rome, yet again suffering gladly for the sake of Jesus glory, His great name above every name.  It’s easy to see Paul’s life and think we could never live up to all that he did and said.  How about the life of someone not as well known like Epaphras?

Epaphras

When we look at biblical characters in Scripture, we often miss the ones that are mentioned the least.  So it is with our dear brother Epaphras who planted the church in Colossae after hearing the Gospel in Ephesus. 

He is mentioned only three times in all of the New Testament and though he is not mentioned as a great theologian, a dynamic speaker, attractive or well dressed, powerful, well schooled, well learned, or well known, Paul sees in this humble teacher and preacher of this young and small church plant, a man with qualities that will shake most theologians at the core of their inflated view of themselves.

• Epaphras taught the Gospel to the Colossians
• Epaphras was a slave of Jesus the King
• Epaphras was a faithful servant
• Epaphras was always laboring for those in the church of Colossae

Colossians 1:7 just as you learned it from Epaphras, our beloved fellow bond-servant, who is a faithful servant of Christ on our behalf,

This is a man that was from Colossae, perhaps he grew up and lived his whole life in this once prominent but now insignificant town.  What marks him first is that he is a slave of Jesus his King, He is faithful in His service to Christ, which means he is working with Paul on his behalf for the sake of the Gospel.

How many of you men would like to be called a beloved, slave, and faithful servant of your King by the Apostle Paul?

Colossians 4:12 Epaphras, who is one of your number, a bondslave of Jesus Christ, sends you his greetings, always laboring earnestly for you in his prayers, that you may stand perfect and fully assured in all the will of God.

Again he is called a slave of Jesus Christ.  In his service to Christ he is compelled to labor earnestly (which means to fight and contend) for his family in Jesus.  He prays for their stance in Christ.  What is this stance he prays for?  Is it that they would stop sinning?  That they would stop gossiping?  How large is Epaphras prayers that he labors and fights for so intensely and constantly?  That his fellow brothers and sisters would stand perfect and have full assurance before their King in all the will of God!  What a prayer!  This is no rookie prayer. 

He’s not praying for the non-believers to be saved, he’s praying for those that already follow Jesus Christ, that they would be so impassioned in their affections for Christ, so consumed in the fire of the Spirit of the living God that praying for others is unnecessary because if they stand perfected in full assurance in all of God’s will, living as men and women who have met the King of all, their hearts will have no choice but to compel them to the lost in their time.

Philemon 1:23 Epaphras, my fellow prisoner in Christ Jesus, greets you,

How faithful was Epaphras?  How about doing prison time with Paul at Rome? 

Can you imagine seeing the supremacy and sufficiency of Christ as so important that you would travel 1200-1300 miles on foot and ship to get to Rome so that he could seek that counsel of Paul on how to best deal with those who were attacking Jesus name and glory?  Can you imagine the view of Jesus that Epaphras must have had?

The sufficiency and supremacy of Jesus is what moves this letter.  It’s the declaration of this true Jesus that Paul writes of.  It’s not a long list of all the intricacies and errors of those who are creeping in that Paul focuses on, it’s Jesus in His unveiled glory that confounds the minds, crushes the skepticism, shuts the mouths, and destroys self-sufficient legalism.  When Jesus viewed in truth, nothing remains the same.  Even rocks will cry out in praise of Him. 

STUDY

Colossians 1:1-2 Paul, an apostle (Greek- apostolos: an ambassador, a commissioner, a messenger, a herald) of Jesus Christ (Messiah, Anointed One, King) by the will (Greek- thelema: desire, pleasure, will) of God, and Timothy our brother, 2  To the saints and faithful brethren in Christ who are at Colossae: Grace to you and peace from God our Father.

Speak of Christ as true King in opposition to the Roman rule Colossians was under.  How Paul thinks of Christ as preeminent in the spiritual as well as physical world.

Talk about how things changed from 313 Ad and Christianity became institutionalized.  No longer is the church about the centrality of Jesus being all in all of every issue, every need, every ounce of worship.  Jesus became the figurehead of an institution instead of the head of a body of loving brothers and sisters.  The New Testament believers were more concerned about being with, focusing on, glorifying, contemplating His supremacy, loving and being loved by Jesus than they were in self-help, quick fix, passive and self-serving religious interests.  The power of God moved through them and the church grew as He reigned in their life and ruled in their hearts.

This caused the most powerful empire in the history of the world, Rome, to come crashing to its knees.  Based on a grass-roots movement a group of godly Christians planted churches and were moved by the spirit of God to show forth God’s glory in power, in all of life.  Christ was indeed supreme and sufficient not only in fact, but also in the practice of their lives. 

As we catch a glimpse of the splendor of Jesus through this book I pray you will be moved to a greater depth of love and adoration for Him.  I pray we are engulfed with His majesty and find ourselves speaking, thinking, feeling, living, acting, loving differently than where we are today. 

If Jesus is truly the Jesus of this letter, may we be swallowed up in His greatness and find ourselves fully satisfied in Him.

He gets the glory, we get the joy.  Praise be to God!

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