Joining Jesus in Changing Lives | Listen to Jesus (Colossians 2:1-10)

Starting the journey with the foundational teachings of Jesus’ truth is crucial. Jesus asks, “Do you listen to me?” highlighting the importance of His saving work as described in His Word. We thrive on joy rather than guilt by taking Jesus’ truth seriously. Being rooted in Christ and taking God's word seriously is essential for spiritual growth. Deepening one’s relationship with God leads to growth in hope, peace, and purpose.

Transcript

Back in college, I had a workout partner who had an interesting approach to fitness. He had this cycle of being super dedicated for 3-4 weeks, then he would give up on it for a month, then jump back in. But every time he’d start up again, he would go back to step one, starting with the lowest weights. And I’d ask him, “Why do you always start over?” And he’d say something like, “I just want to get that initial rush again, you know what I mean?” When he started working out, he loved it, he was getting results, but then he’d hit his first plateau and he’d plummet. Believe it or not, there are more parallels between physical fitness and faith fitness than you may think. When we begin to discover by the power of the Holy Spirit through the Word, who Jesus is, the life he has for us, it’s an amazing rush. But what happens when the thrill fades, when you hit a spiritual plateau, and faith becomes more abstract and less real?

That’s the danger the Apostle Paul was compelled to warn the Colosse Christians about. The Christians there had reached the “Discover Jesus” step of discipleship. If you read Colossians 1, Paul has nothing but good things to say about them, but he’s seen this movie before. Maybe you’ve lived it. The movie of faith can go like this. God the Holy Spirit brings a person to faith, giving a whole new heart, a whole new view of life. It’s the thrill of having an identity in Jesus, the infatuation stage of faith if you will, even if you were baptized as a baby, you can still think of moments in your life when you had that nearness to God as you read a passage. So much joy, so much freedom! But then something happens. Finding joy in God can become a struggle. Why? Because when you are given the identity as a child of God, Satan starts working double-time. I often tell people when they begin START and GROW classes that they shouldn’t be surprised if life gets harder after their intentional desire to get into the Bible. It’s the stage of faith Satan loves to pounce on, the first “plateau” when the initial joy of encountering God’s grace in Jesus fades when the struggle gets intense.

Maybe you’re wondering…How does this happen? Paul tells us, “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ.” A heart once captivated by Christ can easily become captivated by the hollow yet deceptive counterfeit joys that sin and Satan put before us. When hollowness takes hold, when emptiness sets in, it’s all too easy for faith to become abstract. What do I mean?

Faith isn’t designed to be merely a concept or idea. This is precisely why Paul says, “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.” Faith’s realness comes from the concrete work of Jesus. When you read the book of Colossians you’ll see these constant references to Jesus being fully human, a living, breathing 100% human, yet also 100% God. Why do you think Paul emphasizes that? Because in their culture, there was a philosophy called gnosticism all around, and one of the teachings of this false religion was that Jesus wasn’t truly a human being, and that the ultimate existence is to transcend your physical body, and that everything physical and tangible doesn’t matter compared to your psychological or spiritual self. It was not seeing people holistically as the Bible teaches, but that our physical bodies are merely vehicles to be treated however we want. So they taught Jesus was not really human, but rather a spirit being who would lead us to transcend our bodies. And as crazy as that sounds, do you realize the same philosophy is in our society today, and maybe you’re struggling with it without even realizing it?

In our American culture, there has been a huge increase in paganism. Paganism, not just like in the occult, which is one of the fastest-growing religions in America. There are more 5x more practicing witches than our entire WELS church network. But paganism at its core is the belief that either nature is essentially god or the pursuit of power is. For being as “enlightened” and “educated” as we claim to be as Americans, we’re taking a page right out of the ancient world’s playbook. David Wolpe, an expert in ancient religions, wrote in The Atlantic, “Most ancient pagan belief systems were built around ritual and magic, coercive practices intended to achieve a beneficial result. They centered on the self. The revolutionary contribution of monotheism was its insistence that the principal concern of God is, instead, how people treat one another.” In other words, what happens when Jesus is just a mere abstract in a sea of ideas? In our sin, we default to life orbiting around the self. So what was the serious danger for the Colossian Christians and one that remains for us today? The abstraction of our faith, disconnecting it from our everyday reality.

It’s what happens when Jesus becomes less and less the real Savior, and more and more a noble idea. It’s what happens when we separate our faith which is designed to permeate every aspect of who we are mind, soul, and body, and life, and it becomes a box. A box only to be taken out in select environments. When Jesus becomes abstract, the Bible becomes less relevant. When life comes at you, all of a sudden, time spent reading and wrestling with the Bible goes away.  Your faith fitness begins to plummet, and Jesus loses his realness to you. Do you know what that’s like? When God seems distant from you, it’s not because he’s moved. We have. He’s here in his Word waiting to speak to you, but we convince ourselves we don’t have the time or the energy. With that in mind think about this. If you saw a friend who stopped eating for weeks, or you noticed she was always severely dehydrated, would you not consider that an emergency? You’d want them to get help physically for their body and psychologically for their mind, right? But what about if a friend stops coming to worship, or fades out of our church family? This is just as big of an emergency, if not more so, because the more Jesus becomes an abstract outsider in our lives, the more we live our lives according to the hollow counterfeit worldviews that Satan longs for us to buy into. This process is often very subtle, in such a way that it reminds me of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” In the very last chapter of the book, Dr. Jekyll reflects, “I was slowly losing hold of my…better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my….worse. Hyde was indifferent to Jekyll, or but remembered him as the mountain bandit remembers the cavern in which he conceals himself from pursuit.” That’s the future Satan longs for you, to choke out your joy, for you to see Jesus as but a passing thought and nothing more, but our real Savior won’t be moved.

It’s here that Christianity shines brightly in a world of confusion, one of its primary unique features that no other worldview can lay claim to: We believe in a flesh and blood real God, defined by love, clothed in limitless power, and who seeks to dwell with us. Jesus is not just a therapeutic or psychological idea. He is the living, breathing, totally human, totally God, Messiah.

He’s our God who humbled himself to need food, to need water, who experienced all our emotions, lived under the law, who endured every struggle we have, yet without sin. He’s our King who became nothing, who suffered, died, and rose in real human history to give you real hope, real joy, real peace. He’s our God who still gives us his real body and blood in the Lord’s Supper, who still speaks in the realness of human language. We can’t look past him. He stands and remains. The more we see how real he is, the more we marvel at his grace. He isn’t but a mere story, he’s reality himself, who intends for you to be built up in his very body, the ultimate real church of all believers built upon Christ the foundation, whom no storm can move. And when you see the realness of Jesus and his grace, the realness of how he communicates through real language, through real physical means like water, bread and wine, connected to his Word, we want to not just start and grow in God’s Word, but be rooted in it. Just think about how growing in God’s Word changes how you look at every aspect of your life!

It changes how you look at your body, contrary to what we hear all the time that the body holds you back from being your ultimate self. Through technology, we think we extend ourselves beyond all boundaries, but that’s not the nature of things. Jesus intends to redeem mind, soul, and body. In fact, he considers your body so marvelous, one because he designed you, and two because he intends to give you a glorious body when he comes back for you. Nancy Pearcey captures this in her phenomenal book “Love Thy Body, “Christianity assigns the human body much richer dignity and value. Humans do not need freedom from the body to discover their true authentic self. Rather we can celebrate our embodied existence as a good gift from God. Instead of escaping from the body, the goal is to live in harmony with it.” Think about how the realness of Jesus affects you emotionally. Hearing God’s voice found only in the Bible can speak to your pain, that when you feel uprooted from life, it leads to the living water of Jesus. Friends this is what happens when you live not for something, but for the ultimate Someone.

Think about this. If someone saved your life, would you not feel indebted to them, you’d want to serve them at some level to show your gratitude for them, the love you have for them. You wouldn’t do such things because you felt morally obligated, but because of an overflowing of thankfulness! Doesn’t that sound a little like Colossians 2:6-7, “So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness.” You do have someone who saved your life, who gave his for yours. A real Savior who gives you the realest love and hope ever known.

Can’t you see why we strive as a church to take people through our START and GROW classes? We aren’t about just adding people to our membership database, we’re not about numbers, we’re about souls, we’re about coming alongside young-in-faith Christians who share their joy with us renewing our appreciation for who we have in Jesus, and the more seasoned Christians among us can share their depths and insights and compassion, not just in a church setting, but investing in each other, reminding each other that Jesus is oh-so-real, no matter what you are processing in life. It’s the calling card of the Christian faith. This rootedness, this strong foundation, this boldness to face life is not something we can conjure up in ourselves. By grace, we stand by our real Jesus who is our strength, our ever-constant joy. And how can we constantly remind ourselves that Jesus is exactly who says he is? We listen to him.

That’s what Helmuth James Graf von Moltke did. He lived in Nazi Germany and spoke up against the human injustices perpetrated by the Third Reich. Long story short he and wife Freya were put in a maximum security prison in Berlin called the Tegel Prison, and as he faced execution, he faced it fearlessly. Not because he was some super-human Christian, but the realness of Jesus through the Word was there. Listen to a letter he wrote to his wife, very soon before Jesus took him home. “My love, since yesterday my death has become closer and more real, and I am very happy about it. I’m in good spirits even so, or for that very reason, and nonetheless determined to fight for my life. But there is no doubt whatsoever that only a miracle of God can save me.” Each day, Helmuth would have a spiritual workout of reading the Psalms and Romans in the morning, then memorizing Bible passages, then in the afternoon more Old Testament books, then the Gospels, and at end the day he would read hymns and psalms until he fell asleep. His time in the Bible was his top priority, because it’s there he’d see the realness of our God. He ended his letter like this, “Sometimes I focus on the great moment of death; I tremble at the thought that creaturely fear will overpower me then, that, you might say, I will miss out on this moment that is all about keeping the faith. How very weak we are! Only grace can help us keep the faith and see the Redeemer.” Dear family, don’t sacrifice your time with Jesus in the Word for anything, hear his voice with your wife, with your husband, gather around him with your children and grandchildren, your friends, because there you’ll hear the Someone you live for, he the One who lives for you. See your Redeemer Jesus, he is oh-so-real, and his grace is no mere abstract, but the very bedrock of your life. Amen.