The True Gospel | Colossians 1:1-8
Brad O’Dell | June 11, 2023
Go ahead and turn in your Bibles to Colossians 1. We’re starting a new series that’s going to take us through the summer; we’re going to be working chunk by chunk through this letter to the church in Colossae, written by the apostle Paul.
As you guys are turning there, I want to bring this image to mind or this scene, and I think it’s something we’ve all experienced, and it’s really kind of something that I want to set a tone for our whole approach to this book of Colossians. It’s this: think of when you were a child. Think of when you were a kid and you were maybe even a young teen, and you thought a lot about the kind of person you were going to be someday. You would dream about it and you had a lot of ideas. I thought I’d be a professional baseball player; it didn’t work out. That’s why I’m here this morning, but by God’s grace this is where I want to be.
You know, the only thing that limited us in that time was our imagination. It was a very exciting time, where we could think all the doors were open, all the avenues seemed available to us. I could be whatever I wanted to be, within some limitations. We would just dream about who we were going to be someday.
In the cycle of life, as we get into adulthood, we stop dreaming about who we’re going to be someday and we kind of are like, “How do I figure out life right now and figure out who I am right now?” We’re just making tweaks, and some of those changes in our life are not as drastic and dramatic.
But I think this letter of Colossians calls us to recapture something of that excitement, something of that wonder, something of that hope, as we look forward in our spiritual lives, that we had when we were kids looking forward in life. It helps us recapture some of that.
In the life cycle, we know that there’s this bell curve that happens with our physical lives, our mental lives, where we grow and we advance and we change a lot, and then we reach a place where there’s still some growth and some change happening, but it’s not as drastic. Then we know that there is a decline that will soon come if the Lord gives us a long and full life.
But in Scripture there’s this neat presentation of our spiritual growth path, and that is that as we continue to press into the Lord and as we continue to walk in faith and as we continue to walk closely with Jesus, we don’t have to have kind of advance and decline, but the cycle of our life can continue to go up and up and up and up until the moment that we see Jesus face to face. The apostle Paul says that even though our outer shell is wasting away, we can be renewed day after day in our spirits or in our inner man or woman. Right?
It’s a wonderful path, and I want us to have an image of that, that as we go to this letter where the apostle Paul is talking to a young church, young Christians, they haven’t been around for a long time, he’s calling them to maturity, to growth in Christ, and he’s giving them this vision of what that could be and the beauty and the wonder of it.
I want us, as we walk into this letter, to have something of that for ourselves. The promise of Scripture is that I can always grow more and more and more into the fullness of who I am in Christ, and I want to look forward with excitement to who I might be someday as I see God’s grace worked out in my life.
With that, let’s read the text, Colossians 1:1-8.
“Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother,
“To the saints and faithful brothers in Christ at Colossae:
“Grace to you and peace from God our Father.
“We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. Of this you have heard before in the word of the truth, the gospel, which has come to you, as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and increasing—as it also does among you, since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth, just as you learned it from Epaphras our beloved fellow servant. He is a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf and has made known to us your love in the Spirit.”
Really what we have here are Paul’s opening words, and Paul’s opening words here are similar to Paul’s opening words in a lot of his letters. He has a simple little greeting, where he introduces himself and says who it’s to, and he has these common phrases of “grace and peace to you”; that’s a classic Greek greeting and a classic Jewish greeting that he would greet people with as he wrote letters to them. Then we usually have something of this—some sweet opening words, something encouraging, something that is exhortative. Here it’s a prayer, where he’s thanking God for God’s work in the lives of the Colossian believers.
What he’s doing here is not just that it’s a greeting and a prayer; those are pretty standard. But the content of this prayer I think is really important for us, and it actually helps set direction for everything else Paul is going to talk about in the letter. Like I said, he’s talking to some young Christians, and he’s calling them to maturity in Christ. But before he calls them to maturity in Christ, what he does is he reminds them and affirms them that they have truly received the gospel. He talks about God’s work in this, he talks about the messengers who have brought it to them, he talks about how this has worked out and has changed them in their lives, and he gives God glory for this. But also he is grounding these Colossian believers back in the gospel, and he’s saying, “Truly, you have received the gospel, and because of that I’m going to call you to live fully in it and to see how you are not deceived to follow something else that might look similar or might also look compelling but is not the true gospel.”
That’s the foundation that he’s setting. What I want to do today is essentially glean some of these evidences of the true gospel that I think we see manifest in this passage. I’m going to use this outline as we go through today. I’m going to look at aspects of the true gospel:
1. Its Content
2. Its Source
3. Its Reception
4. Its Fruit
1. Its Content
The first thing we see there with the true gospel is we see some of its content. What Paul does is throughout this section he uses a number of synonymous phrases for the gospel. He has different ways of saying what the gospel is in different parts. I want to look at that language and see what we can learn about the gospel.
Before we go into that too far, I don’t want to miss the most obvious thing, and that’s the word “gospel” itself. He says right there in verse 5, “The word of truth, the gospel, which has come to you.” The gospel itself.
Let’s not miss the fact that this word “gospel” means good news. The content of the true gospel, at its base, is good news to a world that needs to hear it. It’s a message. It’s a message of good news about how Jesus, the Son of God, entered our world and accomplished everything that needed to be done to deliver us from our sin and from the dominion of Satan. Then he did everything that needed to be done to bring us back into a right relationship with God.
As you read through the Scriptures you see that for a long time people had sat in darkness, and they had tried to kind of blindly scramble their way into finding salvation and finding how to get back into a right relationship with God, but the more they tried, and all the different ways they used their wisdom to try to find it, they found that they still remained mired in their sin and they remained stuck in darkness in their ignorance. In the words of one passage of Scripture, people “without God and without hope in this world.”
But then Jesus comes, right? This is the good news! Then Jesus came, and Jesus is the light that has come into the darkness. It says Jesus was the life, and the life was the light of men. That’s what it says at the beginning of the Gospel of John.
What Jesus does is he comes into this world and he opens the door afresh to a right relationship with God, and he brings people out of darkness and into light as they follow him. This is the good news of the gospel.
Isaiah 9 says it like this: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in the land of deep darkness, on them a light has shone.”
The gospel is good news of salvation and right relationship with God for a people who was stuck in darkness.
But also we see a little more of the content of this true gospel, and that’s captured in this word “grace.” Look in verse 6, near the end, right before verse 7. He’s talking about this gospel, and he says, “Since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth,” and that’s a little phrase he uses to explain the gospel, “the grace of God in truth.” We see in this passage that the gospel, the good news, is a word of grace. It’s a message of grace. This makes the goodness of this news so much sweeter.
We don’t have to take a lot of time trying to live the Christian life, trying to walk in this light that Jesus has brought, before we realize that though we love the light in a lot of ways and though we see a lot of its beauty, a very strong, powerful part of us still very much loves the darkness and loves walking in the darkness. It’s actually very difficult to stay in the light, and a lot of times we just don’t want to. That can be crushing, right? Though Jesus has come and the path has been laid and the door opened for us to come back into right relationship with God, we find that as we keep trying to walk that path we always find that we can’t keep ourselves on the path and we wander off of it.
We’re like the company of the dwarves in the book The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien. At one point they have to go through the forest of Mirkwood, a very dangerous forest with lots in it, and something like a magic stupor actually comes over the forest and starts to cloud and muddy peoples thoughts. Gandalf says, “Stay on the path, or else you’ll never find it again.” They wanted to, they tried to, but as they came in and as they became drunk in the stupor and magic of this place, they found that they ended up just wandering off the path.
This is what our Christian life is like. Even as we continue to try to walk this path of right relationship with God and seek that and pursue it, we find that the sin in our lives leads us into this stupor and we stumble right back into the darkness and danger that we were trying to avoid.
This is why the gospel being a message of grace is so, so sweet. It’s not about our actions, it’s not about what we can accomplish, it’s not about what we can do in this life to seal our salvation, but it’s all about what Jesus has done. It’s all about what God has promised to accomplish based on his merits.
You see, the good news of the gospel is that God doesn’t say, “Here is the path; hopefully stay on it,” it’s that he says, “I will surely accomplish this in you, and I give it to you as a free gift.” The gospel says that our salvation is not dependent on our holding onto God, but is instead on God’s holding onto us. If you have been saved, if you have come to know Jesus, that will surely happen, because God has committed himself to it. It is a free gift; it’s a gift of grace.
We see another aspect of the gospel, and it’s wrapped up in this phrase in verse 5. Verse 4 says, “We heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and the love that you have for all the saints, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven.” This is another way to see the gospel; it’s a hope laid up for us in heaven.
You see, the good news is not just that Jesus died for our sins, but that he was raised to new life, and that he also ascended to be with the Father in glory. As surely as Jesus was raised to new life and ascended to be with the Father, so we too, if we are in Christ, will resurrect to new, glorified life and we will spend eternity with the Father. There is a hope laid up for us in heaven that is sure and that is held fast for us, and we can hope in that and we can rest in that.
Church, the good news of the gospel is that no matter what life throws at us, no matter how much the brokenness of this world might start to break us down—and that will happen; it will happen in lots of ways—we remember that this life is not all there is. There is a hope stored up for us in heaven because of the good news of what Jesus has done and what he has promised to do. We can have a hope that endures and that helps us press on with faithfulness till the end.
The last phrase I want to look at is in verses 5-6. This is a simple phrase that talks about how the gospel is a message of truth. He simply says this in verse 6. He says, “Of this you have heard before in the word of the truth, the gospel.” “The word of truth, the gospel.” The gospel is the word of truth.
What does that mean? It means that this gospel message—everything we’ve talked about—it is grounded in reality, right? It’s true to what God has actually done in history, what Jesus has actually done in history, and who he is, right? It’s grounded in what God surely will do. It is true, it is real, it’s something that has happened.
But it’s also true to God’s nature, his character, his ways, his promises. It’s true to his revelation and to all of these Scriptures where he said, “This is what I will surely do,” and this is what he has surely done. This is who God is, and the gospel is the good news that accords with what is true.
You see, these Colossian believers as we study this letter are going to encounter a lot of philosophies, as Paul will say it, a lot of religions that promise a lot. They’re pretty compelling, they’re pretty interesting, they give a lot of good answers on how to deal with some of the difficulties of life. They have the appearance of wisdom, he’ll say. They can even lead someone to maybe more stability in life, maybe some happiness in some sense. They’re good except that they have one weakness, and that’s this: they are not true. There’s only one true way of salvation and only one true way to be in right relationship with God, and that is this gospel message. It’s this: that Jesus, the Son of God, became man and lived a perfect, sinless life. But he was also delivered up to be crucified according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, and after that he was raised to new life so that we might receive his payment for our sins, so that we might have that new resurrection life as well.
That is true to who God is. It’s true to what he said he would do. It’s true to his plan that he set before the foundation of the world was laid. This is the truth, the gospel is the word of truth, and that is the ground of our faith.
Church, we’re going to see lots of things in our current world that are very similar to the first century. There are lots of competing philosophies, lots of things that seem good, that seem like the way to a good life, that seem like ways for helping us improve as people. As good as those things might be, and helpful in some sense, they will not accomplish salvation, they will not bring us into right relationship with God. There is only one true message that does that, and that is the truth of the gospel.
2. Its Source
That’s the content of the gospel, but also in this passage we see the gospel’s source. The true gospel always has a source.
Here we have two different things I want to focus on, but first I want to recognize this, that the gospel is a message, and a message must be sent or brought. It says it right there in verse 6. It says, “The gospel, which has come to you.” The gospel must come as a message if it is to be heard and understood.
We see two sources of this. First, we see God. In this whole passage Paul is praying to God, giving thanks for everything that happens. He sees how the gospel has gone to the Colossian believers. He sees how it has changed their life. He sees how people were faithful to God to bring that message to them. And what does he do? He gives God the thanks for all of it, because he knows that God is the grounds, God is the one who made the decisive action to send the gospel to these believers.
I think it’s just really important for us to remember here this morning—church: if you know Jesus, if you have come to salvation, if you know the truths of the word of God, that this gospel has landed in your heart and has changed you and made you new, it’s because the Father set his heart on you. The Father set his heart on you. He knew you before the foundations of the world were laid, and he set his heart on you, and he says, “I’m going to bring this message of good news and salvation and hope and joy and peace and life and all of that—I’m going to bring it to you, and I have my heart set on you.” God is the one who, in the words of Ephesians, “chose you in Christ before the foundation of the world.” As Jesus says in multiple places, all of his children have been given to him by the Father. What a wonderful message, that the Father has set his heart on you. If the gospel’s come to you, it’s because God desired that it would.
But of course, that doesn’t negate the human involvement in this whole process of bringing the others. That’s what we see in the second source here. He is trying to encourage the Colossian believers that the source of this gospel that they’ve heard is reliable and it’s true, and he focuses on the messengers of this gospel.
Of course, the primary one is Epaphras. Epaphras was this disciple of Paul. Likely, like Timothy or Silas, he spent some time with Paul, traveling with him. Epaphras is one who goes out with this message, and he goes to Colossae, a town that Paul never visited, and he goes and he brings the message of the gospel. God does a work of the Spirit, and a church is awakened and is planted there in Colossae. So Paul sys there in verse 7, “It was through Epaphras that you heard this gospel.”
But also we see it in Paul’s opening, when Paul starts with this simple phrase: “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God.” He starts almost all of his letters like that. That word “apostle” means a messenger or a “sent one.” All of the apostles thought that this was core to who they were. They were ones who had been given this message of good news, and their job was to go and take it to others. So, for the gospel to come to anyone it must be brought.
This is always the case, right? We see this in Romans 10:13-15, a very important passage of Scripture, but I want us to remember it again. It says,
“For ‘everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’
“How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!’”
We kind of have this both/and, don’t we? We have God as the source and as the grounds of this reality that the gospel message was sent to the Colossian believers, but also we know that it’s true that it came through the hand of faithful messengers who took it upon themselves to bring this message as God had called them to bring this message.
It’s kind of like this; here’s a simple illustration. Think of when you’re sending a letter to someone. Let’s assume that it’s a perfect working mail system and nothing can gum up this process. If you want someone to receive a letter with some information, you can make sure that that message will get delivered by writing the message and then addressing the envelope, putting the right postage on it, and putting it in the mailbox, right? You are the one who made sure that that person would receive the message because you’re the one who initiated that process. However, that doesn’t negate the fact that there are many hands that will be involved in actually getting that letter to its location.
In the same way, God is the one who initiated and ensured that these Colossian believers would receive the gospel; however, it only got through to them because there were faithful messengers who heard this call of God and were active in bringing the message to them.
I want to take this out of all this that we’ve dwelt on. Church, we need to remember that all of us—every single one of you here, if you know Jesus—you are called to be a messenger of this gospel. You are. You’re called to be an ambassador for Christ. That isn’t some special class of people; those are all of us who are in Christ. We are ambassadors for Christ. The Lord has put people in your life that only you can reach and that you are equipped and called to bring the gospel to. If I were to meet them I probably wouldn’t even be able to bring it to them effectively; the Lord’s put them in your life, and you are called to be the messenger of the gospel to them.
The only real question is, Will you be faithful to the call? Will you be a faithful messenger of this gospel? I know it’s difficult, I know it’s not simple, I know it takes some opportunity and some openness in different areas; I get that. But will you be faithful to the call?
These Colossians believers—Paul is delighted and he’s rejoicing, he’s overwhelmed in thankfulness to God because of how their lives have been changed and they’ve experienced salvation because they heard the message through Epaphras. The real question is, Who will hear through you? Who will experience life and salvation and the light of Jesus because you were faithful to bring them the message?
3. Its Reception
But also in this passage we see the reception of the gospel. There are two aspects that when the true gospel comes it is received in a special way, and there are two aspects I want to point out here.
(1) The first is focused on this word “understanding.” Look at verse 6. It’s not just that the message of the gospel was brought to them. He says, “Indeed in the whole world [this gospel] is bearing fruit and increasing—as it also does among you, since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth.”
We have to recognize that it’s not just that the message goes to people, but that God has to do a work on the human heart to enable them to understand and to see clearly. This is something that God does by his grace and his power, that he changes the heart, so when those truths come there’s a heart that is ready to receive it and to meet it with faith.
In Colossians 1:26 Paul calls it a mystery. The gospel is this mystery, and he says it like this: “The mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to his saints. To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”
I love that phrase. It’s one of my favorite phrases in the New Testament, “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” That’s what I’ve titled this whole series, because I think it’s central to this letter.
But what is he saying here? The gospel is this mystery, and it is a mystery that has to be revealed in a special way. How is that done? God chose to make it known to these people.
This is always how it is with the reception of the true gospel. God must open up the eyes of the heart to see.
Paul says it like this in 2 Corinthians 4: “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”
When the gospel came to us, how did we see it as glorious? How did we see Jesus’ glory and love it and respond to it as something we desired and loved? It was because, in the same way that God spoke and light came into creation, he spoke and the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ erupted in our hearts, and that is how we came to understand this message of the gospel.
(2) But of course, just as above, this isn’t the only thing in view. There’s still a human element here as well, and we see this in the word “faith.” You see, God in this change ensures that this faith surely will be given or be used, but there is still a human responsibility, that when we hear the gospel and when we understand it, we are to respond in faith.
Paul says this in verse 4. First, in verse 3 he says, “We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus.” That is always a necessary element. For the true gospel to be experienced and realized in our life, it must be responded to in faith. What is faith? It is a decisive act of our will to believe in what Jesus has done, and at the same point to stop believing in ourselves, in our own wisdom, in our own ways, in our own desires, and instead to trust that what Jesus has done and what he has called us to is what is true and right and good in this life. We respond with faith.
We also follow Jesus as the Lord of our life, take ourselves off the throne of our hearts, and put Jesus there instead as the true King. This is a wonderful truth about the gospel, that as we respond in faith—this is a beautiful thing—the gospel is something that we don’t have to achieve anymore in our own strength, in our own power, in our wisdom, but it’s just simply something we receive.
The moment you start trying to add your works into it, things that you might do to keep yourself in it or to accomplish it, then you’ve stopped believing in the true gospel.
Paul says it like this in Ephesians 2: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing, it is a gift of God, not a result of works.” This is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.
Here’s where I want to bring this home to us. I know the church I’m speaking to. This is a reformed church, and you guys are like, “We got this one, pastor. Justification by faith—I tattooed it on my chest when I was sixteen! I was maybe young and dumb when I did it, but I still get excited when I see it in the mirror. We know this one. Move on.” Right?
I get it. This is doctrine that we’ve really grabbed hold of and we love. However, I think in the daily course of our lives, though we believe this, as we continue to live this life in these gospel realities, we can tend to fall back into focusing mostly on what we do. What am I doing? What should I be doing? What can I do better in order to achieve this righteousness? We fall into this despair of our Christian walk, and I wonder if this is some of you here. You’re almost in a place of despair with your Christian walk because you just keep failing. The battle with sin is something where you just keep ending up on the wrong side, right?
If you’re honest with yourself, though you know that Jesus will ultimately save you someday, you’re just struggling to believe that it will actually manifest in the here and now. What do you do? You start looking at yourself a lot, you start kicking yourself, you start figuring out, “What can I do? How can I motivate myself better? How can I figure this out and get myself to where I can achieve and experience the blessings of God?”
The gospel says, No, no, no, don’t do that; you’ll never reach it that way. Instead, take the eyes of your heart off of yourself, put them on yourself, put them on what Jesus has done, and let that be your motivation to holiness and righteousness. Yes, there’s work to do; yes, there’s discipline to be enacted. I get that. However, let it be from a place of looking at what Jesus has done, what Jesus surely will do, rejoicing in that, meditating on it, knowing that is true, and believing. You have to believe it day after day, moment by moment. That is what is true, not all of my experiences that would say otherwise.
As you meditate on that, you will find that you grow in your victory and you grow in this life that is yours in Christ. That’s what it is to walk in this life of faith.
4. Its Fruit
The last point I want to focus on here today is the fruit of the gospel. We see this in a few phrases.
(1) The first we see is the love that is manifest in these Colossian believers. Paul focuses on it in two places in this short passage. He does it there in verse 4. He says, “Not only have we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus, but also the love you have for all the saints.” Then in verse 8, after he talks about Epaphrus being a “faithful minister of Christ on your behalf,” he says, “He has made known to us your love in the Spirit.”
What Paul is amazed by is that as the gospel has come into the lives of this young church, he knows that Jesus is at work and the Spirit of God is doing wondrous things—why? Because of their love! They’re people who love deeply and they love well and they love truly. It’s an odd thing that they would have a love for all the saints—they’ve never met these people. They don’t have FaceTime! They’re not keying into all the services that are happening in Ephesus and Philippi and whatever. They just have a deep love for all the other brothers and sisters in Christ, and actually, it leads them to receive these affections from Paul in this powerful way, because they’ve never met Paul. They’ve heard about him through Epaphras, but they receive his prayers of affection for them and it stirs them in their faith, because they have this love that God has wrought in their hearts for the other people of faith. As they share this common identity and the love they receive from Jesus, it leads them to love one another with a special love.
It’s a reminder for us, church, that this is a fruit of the gospel. When we call for unity, when we call to avoid divisiveness, when we call for going to people and talking with them face to face before you start to talk about what they’ve done behind your back in this church, it’s not just because it’ll make things a lot smoother for us on the pastoral level. It does, so knock it off if you’re trying to do that, especially for this summer. Wait until Brian gets back to do that. But it’s not just because it makes it easier, it’s because it’s indicative that something’s off. The fruit of the gospel is not being manifest in your life, because when it is you should have this familial love for people that leads you to want to right the relationship, that leads you to want to be unified with them, that leads you to want to rejoice in common things that you share with them, as opposed to finding ways that you’re divided. The love of the gospel.
We see it also in Paul’s language. Paul is praying for these believers as an affectionate grandfather. Paul speaks about the language of how he’s a spiritual father to people, and we see that. He is with Timothy, he is with Epaphras. These are people who have heard through Epaphras, and he’s never met these people, but look at him. He says, “I thank God when I’m praying for you. I’m constantly praying for you, and I’m always thanking God because I’m so excited about what Jesus is doing in your life. I’m so proud of you,” is what he’s saying.
Do you hear the heart of a proud, full-of-love grandfather of the faith for these believers? He’s saying, “I haven’t met you yet, but I’m so proud of you. I see what God’s doing in your life.” The love of the gospel is a fruit.
(2) We also see hope. We already focused on this in verse 5: “Because of hope laid up for you in heaven.” But I want to focus on this: hope is not just an aspect of what we believe in the gospel, hope is something that is a fruit of the gospel being at work in our lives. It makes us a people of hope. In all the chaos of this world, as all the waves keep crashing on us, as all the foundations keep shaking—and I know we have that a lot in this world; it’s a crazy time. I get that things tend to be shaking. But for those who are grounded in the gospel and are rejoicing in that and are believing in Jesus moment by moment and seeking him, they’ve become a people whose hearts are changed so that hope is actually wrought in our souls. We become a steady, a faithful, a peaceful people, and a people who have this heavenly vision, but it also makes us people who engage the day to day even more effectively and with more heart and concern. The hope of the gospel.
(3) Also we see a changed character, another fruit of the gospel. We see this in the two phrases that Paul addresses these believers with. In verse 2 he says, “To the saints and faithful brothers in Christ at Colossae.” “Saints and faithful brothers.” Those are two astounding titles. Yes, I know Paul throws them around all the time, and it’s because he knows that people who have an identity in Christ have been made new; but it’s an astounding phrase.
Think about it. This is a young church. It was not too long ago that they were completely caught up in all the false religions and the pagan ideologies of that day. They were pagans; they were people—as Scripture says in another place—they were “sons of disobedience.” They were people who followed “the prince of the power of the air,” right? They were a people who loved the darkness rather than the light. But because the gospel was sent to them and because God did a work in their hearts to let them see and know and to give them understanding, because they are faithfully following what God has called them to, something miraculous happens. They aren’t just called saints, but they actually become saints. Those who are far from God are now ones who are called holy, ones who are sanctified, those who are set apart for God’s purposes. This is who they are and this is how they’re living, and Paul is just so excited for it. It’s a change of character, and he calls them faithful brothers. These people who just a short while ago were enemies of the gospel, enemies of God, are now people who he can say, “You are faithful. Even as Jesus was faithful to the Father, so you are a people of faithfulness.” What an amazing thing! The gospel changes our identity and it also changes our character as we believe in what Jesus has done for us and this good news.
(4) The last thing I want to say is multiplication. I don’t know if grammatically this one fits into my scheme, but let’s just roll over it if it doesn’t. Another fruit of the gospel is multiplication. It’s just in this phrase in verse 6. He says, “. . . the gospel, which has come to you, as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and increasing—as it also does among you.”
Paul simply says there’s something that the gospel does as it goes forth: it bears fruit and it increases. “That’s exactly what it’s been doing in your life, believers in Colossae.” He’s grounding this, and this is going to be what actually establishes his call for them to continue in it and to grow into maturity.
What we see here is something of the language that is used at creation, at the beginning of the Bible, when God created man and woman and said, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.” What did he mean there? Was it just that they would have kids? No, it’s a little bit more than that. As image-bearers of God, they were to create more image-bearers of God who knew God and who worshiped him. They were supposed to be at the work of creating more and more worshipers of God that would fill the earth. This was the idea of creation.
But of course, when sin came in it ruined that pattern, and though people were reproducing more and more people, they did a really poor job of producing more and more worshipers of Jesus.
But here we see that the gospel enables the creation mandate to truly be fulfilled, and that as Christians we are able to, as we believe these things, bring this message to others and see God actually create new image-bearers of God in Christ who become true worshipers of God from the heart, and that creation mandate is fulfilled.
I want to leave us with this idea. When the gospel goes and makes an impact in an area, when it makes an impact in a church like ours, there’s something it should be doing and that it does do: it increases and it multiplies.
I would ask you, is the gospel increasing in your life? Are you a stopping-point to the gospel? It came, it made an impact on you, and that’s great, but then you’re keeping it all for yourself? Or is it increasing, is it multiplying? Things that are healthy in nature reproduce themselves. Is it reproducing itself and others?
I know there is a lot that goes into that, but I just want us to (maybe in the reflection time) pray this prayer before God: “God, how can you increase the impact of the gospel in me and through me to the glory of God this week, this month, this year? How can the gospel increase, not only in me but in this church? How do we start to be a place where the gospel increases more and more?” Is the gospel multiplying? Are seeds being planted more and more? Are they being nurtured more and more?
I would ask you to seek God to say, “What’s that look like in my life? What's a step I can take this week to start seeing that happen in my life? I’m captured by this vision of what the gospel does, and I’m excited for it, and I would love to just pour praise and thanks to God for the work of the gospel and salvation that he does in someone’s life in this area who hasn’t yet heard.”
Let’s pray.
Lord, what a wonderful passage to meditate on today! What a joy it is to remember the good news of the gospel, that in a world of difficulty, in a world of brokenness, in a world of hardship and disappointment and lots of false promises, there is something that is true and reliable and it’s good and it’s lifegiving, and it’s the good news of the message that Jesus has come and he’s taken our sins on him and he’s raised to victory over sin and death and he promises new life. Lord, our heart is that that new life would be manifest in us a little bit more today.
Lord, with the apostle Paul—whatever our weeks look like, whatever our months look like—we forget what lies behind and we look forward to the upward call of God in Christ. God, we would love to see you do a work of the gospel in our hearts and souls, to continue to make us more and more new. We ask that you create an excitement in us to look forward and say, “What can I be because of God’s grace in my life in Christ?” God, as we see you respond, we will give you all the glory and all the praise, and we will delight in you as the giver of all good gifts. We give you all the glory here this morning. It’s only in the matchless name of Jesus we pray, amen.