This gets back to what I shared earlier from Col 1:9-10. What is the will of God for all the saints here? To walk worthy of the Lord. How do we walk in this type of worthy manner? By living in a way that is fully pleasing to Him. And what pleases Him? The second half of v10 – bearing fruit in every good work AND growing in the knowledge of God.

God’s will is for you to obey these 2 things. Fruit in every good work and knowledge of God. This echoes the earlier pairing of faith in Christ and love for the saints. Both pairings highlight the two dimensions of the Christian life. The first is highly personal. Do I have personal knowledge of God and do I have true, authentic faith in Christ? This is between me and God. Love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. This is the greatest commandment.

The second dimension is me and others. Am I bearing fruit in every good work and am I loving my fellow saints? Good work can include love for the saints, but good work is broader. Good work can be any good work toward another human being, not limited to the saints. Love your neighbor as yourself. This is the second greatest commandment.

The point is, faith and knowledge of God never remains private and personal. True faith and knowledge of God is eventually expressed in good work or love, something visible and tangible done for the sake of another.

There are two dangers here. We already talked about one. We can think, faith is all I need. The only thing that matters ultimately is knowing God. This is partially true. It sounds right. If you take this to an extreme, we should all quit our jobs and move to a monastery and live like monks praying and reading the Bible and fasting all day. What’s the point gathering in churches? Because we can all meet with Jesus at home by ourselves.

The other danger is stressing the work. You got to do this. You can’t do that. If we are not careful, even good works like loving the saints and taking care of the needs of our neighbors and making disciples and running good programs can originate from man and man’s desire to be successful so that our church grows and everyone knows the Hill and our band gets famous and adopts a name like Hillsong. Our works if it it originates from a desire to elevate ourselves is one of the worst deceptions of the devil. Or if people engage in works out of a sense of guilt or fear or pressure, then we are losing sight of the true gospel.

It’s our faith in the Lord and our knowledge of the Lord that needs to fuel our love for the saints and our good works. There is a reason why loving God is the greatest commandment and loving neighbor comes second. If the order gets mixed up and we prioritize the wrong thing and make secondary things the primary thing, then we risk losing everything. Because we have distorted the gospel.

The gospel says, God loves you and He forgives you and your salvation had absolutely nothing to do with you. And knowing this, when we serve, we do it out of an overwhelming sense of gratitude. Lord, this is the least I can do after all you’ve done for me. Isn’t it funny that the longer we are Christian, we forget that we are saved by the grace of God and we forget that it had nothing to do with works and we reverse the order and begin working to earn God’s favor?

We need to love the saints and bear fruit in every good work. But this love and good works always, always needs to flow out of true, living faith and a real, personal knowledge of the Lord.

If you don’t yet believe in the gospel, I invite you to find someone in this church and ask questions. I’m sure you will find plenty of people here willing to meet with you.

If you are a believer and you’re trying to connect to God but your knowledge of God is more academic than experiential, I want to encourage you to keep pursuing Jesus. Don’t give up. Keep surrendering your life to Jesus. Keep giving your life to Jesus. Keep giving your burdens to Jesus. Spend unhurried time with the Lord. Make it your aim to know Him personally.

If you are connecting to God and you are growing in your knowledge of Him and you are having enjoyable prayer times and God is speaking to you as you open Scripture, don’t stop there. Ask the Lord to push you outward so that you can leave your little bubble so that you can please Him and bear fruit in every good work. If you don’t know where to start, begin praying for the saints here at the Hill. Ask the Lord, who do you want me to love? As the Lord prompts you, step out in obedience and show concern for this brother or sister. And as you step out toward this person, ask the Lord to bear fruit in your interactions.

If you are a Christian and you are loving God and you are loving the saints, ask the Lord to stretch you to be fruitful in every good work. On campus, at your workplace, in your homes. May the gospel bear its fruit in your life wherever He sends you so that seeing your good deeds, non-believers would open their hearts to the gospel and eventually join us in praising our Heavenly Father.

I pray that as we enter Year 2 as Hill Community, we can be a gospel-centered church where we love God, we love the saints, and we show the world the power of God to transform hearts through our good works, that they, too, may believe.

Is this how we should think of the gospel? If we do, we will be making a grave, grave mistake. Fruit comes from the gospel. Fruit, not just in terms of salvation, but fruit in all aspects of the Christian life and maturity. We see this in Paul’s letters. For example, Galatians talks about the fruit of the Spirit. The entire book of Galatians is about the true gospel versus the false gospel of Jewish legalism and tradition. Then, Galatians ends with a comparison between a false gospel and the true gospel. The false gospel results in the works of the flesh while the true gospel produces the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, gentleness and self-control. What is the Spirit’s role? The Spirit’s role is to point us back to the gospel so that you and I can fall more in love with Jesus and give thanks to Jesus always because of His death on our behalf. And as the Spirit guides us to return to this gospel over and over, we will bear spiritual fruit.

In Ephesians, again, Paul spends 3 chapters talking about the gospel. Then, in the second half of the letter, chapters 4-6, he talks about the implications of how we are to walk practically in a manner worthy of the gospel. Specifically, Eph 4 talks about fruitfulness or maturity in the Christian life in terms of being built up into a mature fellowship where we display corporately Christ’s fullness. And how are we to get there? We are to continuously speak the truth in love to achieve corporate, Christian maturity. And what is the truth? The truth is in Jesus, the truth is Jesus, the truth is the gospel, the person and work of Jesus. And as we preach the gospel over and over again to one another in the body of Christ, we are built up, we mature, we bear fruit. We speak the truth of Christ in love, we speak the gospel in love to one another and as we do this, we will become increasingly like Jesus.

It’s like in our home, I’m from Philly and I am a die hard Philly sports fan. I talk about the Philadelphia Eagles, and the Philadelphia 76ers and Jeremy Lin, and guess what, my kids talk about the Eagles, Sixers and Jeremy Lin. I talk about my love for these teams and players enough times and now the fruit of love for these same teams and players has been born in my kids.

Same with Jesus. How do we become more like Jesus? We talk about Jesus, we talk about our love for Jesus, how we trust Jesus, we express to others our gratitude for what Jesus did for us, we preach the gospel to one another, we testify to our freedom in Christ, how He carries my burdens at present, and the future hope that we will be with Him eternally. And as a listener, you hear this and you are built up in your faith. You say, yeah, that’s right. Your affection for Christ is stirred. And as you fix your eyes on Jesus, the things of this world grow strangely dim. Now the love for Jesus has spread to another. And when you have an entire church doing this, we will be built up together into a mature body of Christ reflecting the fullness of Christ to the world.

Throughout the New Testament, the gospel is preached at places like Corinth, at Ephesus, at Galatia, at Colossae, then as a result of the gospel being preached, fruit is born in each of these cities where there is a gospel-centered church and it’s Paul’s testimony from Col 1:6 and it is still true to this day that the gospel is bearing fruit all over the world.

When we say that Hill Community Church strives to be a gospel-centered church, we don’t mean that we simply want to see people saved. When we say that we want to be gospel-centered as a church, we are saying that we want the Person and work of Jesus, the gospel, to remain at the center of who we are and what we are about. Because the gospel not only saves us but the gospel is the source of our growth and maturity.

It is not surprising, then, that Satan’s chief strategy to slow down and stop the gospel from bearing fruit is to introduce false teachers who will distort the pure gospel. As with most of Paul’s letters, here in Colossae, Paul starts with the gospel. Chapters 1 and 2 are principles about the message of truth, the gospel, what we are to believe and Paul warns against false teachers who are trying to distort the gospel. Chapters 3 and 4 are practice, how we are to live in light of correct principles outlined in chapters 1 and 2.

Colossians 2, which we will cover in a couple of weeks, is a warning against false teachers because if a false gospel infiltrates the church like it did among the Colossians and it continues to fester, fruit will stop and true salvations will cease and born again believers will be led astray because the members of the church will no longer be responding to Jesus, but they will be responding to a false teacher or a false religious system or a false ideology, and ultimately to Satan himself.

If you think about it, we are talking about churches that Paul himself planted in the first century. At a time when the apostles were still alive and they actually lived with Jesus. Jesus was their roommate, they ate together, they shared life together in the flesh. They were eyewitnesses to his death and resurrection. This was a time when the Holy Spirit rained down on them in fire to birth the church in the Upper Room as recorded in Acts 2. The Holy Spirit was very active to help preserve the faith of the early church when the Roman Empire was persecuting and killing followers of Christ.

God was active and Satan was equally active. Just as disciples of Christ were being sent out by God empowered by the Holy Spirit, false teachers were being sent out by Satan. This is all in chapter 2. It’s sobering to think, if Paul had to deal with this recurring problem of false teachers spreading a false gospel among God’s churches, do we think Satan is no longer hard at work in our day and age? If Paul had to deal with this problem of gospel distortion, how much more we ought to be on guard so that the gospel we have currently will not be corrupted and diluted and twisted by the forces of evil around us.

Who’s the audience of this letter? v2 – he’s writing to all the saints in Christ at Colossae. Meaning, all of the believers assembled at that local church. And to this local gathering of saints, v3 – Paul always gives thanks because of two things. One, v4, he heard of their faith. And two, he heard of their love for all the saints.

Whose faith? When it says, Paul is thankful for YOUR faith, whose faith is he thankful for? And when Paul is thankful for your love, whose love is he speaking about? In both cases, the word “you” is plural. In the English language, you singular and you plural is often just written as “you.” To be more accurate, it should be “you all” or if you’re from the south, “y’all.” Y’lls faith. YOUR faith, you plural. The faith of all the Colossian saints. And the love YOU plural have for all the saints. The love that all the Colossian saints had for one another. Paul is not singling out a leader or a particular believer in Colossae. It is not an individual’s faith nor an individual’s love, rather, he is speaking about Colossae as a whole.

I think this switch from a “you singular” mentality to a “you plural” mentality provides a helpful corrective for our modern, Western, rugged individualism. We think in terms of me, myself and I. What will I get from church? How will God or church meet my needs? I like this church because I get what I want. Or this church isn’t for me so let me hop around. What is God will for ME, for MY life? Instead, if you are a believer and you are a committed member of this church, making you a saint at the Hill, the question should be, what is God’s will for us?

Now I want to address the Christians for a moment, in particular the saints here at the Hill, those who have faith in Christ and have committed themselves to this church. I want to ask a basic question. Do you have love for the saints? Do you have love for your fellow brothers or sisters? Paul is underscoring the point that you can’t have true faith in Christ without that faith becoming manifest in your love for the other saints. Church is not a seminary. This is not abstract theology. If you want to learn abstract principles, you can attend Fuller down the street. Do you have love for the saints? We are talking about the brother or sister, the saint who sits next to you, do you love him, do you love her? If you claim to love God but fail to love your brother or sister in Christ, the Bible says, you’re a liar. Your love for God is not real unless it is expressed in a love for the saints.

Text: Col 1:1-14

We are beginning our study through the book of Colossians. I have been waiting to teach this book for a while because it’s one of my favorites. In particular, the second half of Col 1 is one of the most beautiful, most profound sections in all of Scripture. It would serve us well as a congregation to get a good handle on this letter.

Today, I want to talk about the will of God. What is God’s will for your life? When we think about God’s will, I think we often think about “calling.” What is God’s calling for my life? And this means, basically, what am I called to do? Am I called to be a professor, doctor, missionary, pastor, social worker, computer programmer? If you’ve been here for a while, you’ve heard me say numerous times now, I don’t believe this is the right question to ask. Because when Scripture uses the word “calling,”it refers to our calling unto salvation. Calling is about salvation, not about what we do.

What we do vocationally is not the same thing as calling. God does give us various gifts and He presents us with opportunities to exercise those gifts. Especially, in a church setting, there are pastors with a shepherding gift, teachers with a teaching gift, and others that God in his sovereignty gives to His church as He sees fit. So I think a more appropriate term to use instead of “calling” would be “giftings” or “works.” Eph 2- God has prepared good WORKS in advance for us to do based on various giftings. We all have things to do, good works for which we have to labor, but the same way that you change jobs, our work for the Lord can change. I am working as a pastor here in Pasadena for the time being. There is no guarantee that God will have me pastor for the rest of my life. I am not God. I don’t know the future. Maybe I will be a missionary next year. Maybe God will send me back to the marketplace. Only God knows.

We like thinking of our calling in terms of what we do, I believe, because we are so results-oriented. Especially in our society, we place a high premium on our achievements, where you went to school and where you work and your job title, so naturally, we bring this mentality into our relationship with God and ask, what can I do with my life for God?

We have been trained to think, we worked hard in school and studied for many years to get a Physics degree, and along the way, we became a Christian, so naturally, we assume, God will open the door and allow me to be Christian professor so that I can be a witness for the gospel on a university campus and serve at the local church. If things pan out and all of your years of hard work studying and doing research in a lab pay off and you end up getting a professorship, glory to God. You’ve found your calling.

But if you don’t get a professorship, then I guess God dropped the ball and you haven’t found your “calling” yet. And since you haven’t found your calling, you’re kind of on the sidelines waiting for God to do something. Or, you are busy knocking on doors, trying to make it happen on your own. Either way, you feel restless or anxious until you figure out what you are going to do with your life.

God’s will for your life according to Scripture is vastly different.

Read Col 1:9-10. [READ]

What is God’s will for your life? It says it right there. Paul is praying for the Colossians to be filled with the knowledge of His will. What is God’s will for your life? What does knowing God’s will accomplish in your life and mine? Paul unpacks the answer in v10. God will is for you to walk worthy of the Lord. It’s not talking the talk, but it’s walking the walk. We all know how to talk about the Christian life. We have plenty of Bible knowledge. That’s not Paul’s concern. God’s will is not that we become expert talkers about faith. Paul is encouraging us to walk in a way that is worthy of the Lord. This deals with practice more than it does with having the right principles.

How are we going to walk worthy of the Lord and live out our Christian lives? God will is for you to walk worthy of the Lord. More specifically, to walk worthy of the Lord is to live in a way that is fully pleasing to Him. How do we please Him? Two things. First, bearing fruit in every good work AND second, growing in the knowledge of God.

Let’s look at the phrase–bearing fruit in every good work first.

This phrase about bearing fruit is preceded by a section all about fruit. Col 1:3-6 [READ].

Verses 5-6 discuss the message of truth. What is the message of truth? The gospel. The good news of Jesus dying on the cross and resurrecting from the grave 3 days later to pay for our sins and to give us a hope of an eternal future with Him. This is the gospel. And if you repent of your sins and place your faith in the Person of Jesus Christ and believe in the gospel, fruit will be born. In fact, Paul testifies that the gospel is bearing fruit and growing all over the world, just as fruit was born at the church in Colossae.

This is such an important point. If you remember anything from this sermon, please remember this. How can we be fruitful Christians that please the Lord? Answer: it is to hold onto the gospel, the person and work of Jesus.

I think we diminish the gospel when we treat it as if it were preschool level, Sunday school teaching only relevant the young kids in the church. Or we diminish the gospel when we think the gospel is only for non-Christians. Spiritually speaking, it’s kids stuff. I’ve been a Christian for my whole life. I’ve graduated from the gospel. Give me the meatier stuff. I’m an AP Christian. Sign me up for the Advanced Placement class for mature disciples. The gospel – it’s only useful for converting people. The gospel is something we tack on at the end of a sermon so that non-believers have a chance of becoming a Christian. At best, the gospel is like an initiation rite for the newly converted believer.