WADING RIVER CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH

SERMONS IN PRINT

Peter Vibert 4/09/06

Colossians 2:20-3:17 “Your Hidden Life”

We live in the overlap of the ages: the “Age to Come” has broken into the world in Jesus, but the “Present Age” is still very much with us. We have talked about how Christians should live in that condition, and how even the taste of the Age to Come affects our perspective on truth, on death and on suffering. Today we look for a moment at how it affects our views on morality. The Apostle Paul wrestled with this in the 1^st C. as he guided the new Christian churches in how to think and live in the middle of a pagan culture. His letter to the church in Colossae is a good example of the issues at stake then and now.

1) Rules Won’t Work

There were those who thought that new Gentiles Christians needed very clear guidance and a firm hand to reform their lives. To tell them too much about “Christian liberty” would be dangerous. What they needed were clear rules and plenty of discipline.

But as Paul knew only too well from his Pharisaic upbringing, such things have only limited impact on people’s behavior. There is an apparent benefit from telling people “Don’t do this, don’t touch that,” because for some time some of them will obey out of deference to authority, out of respect for their teachers. But as a way of reforming morals, it doesn’t go very deep.

Ascetic practices have always found a home in the life of the church, but the promise they offer of order and harmony usually founders on the stubbornness and inner sinfulness of even redeemed people. We have seen it in our own day in the “Just say NO” approaches to alcohol, drugs, sex among young people. Even their most avid promoters admit these schemes don’t do too much. The Southern Baptists, who keep detailed records on these things, found that their “True Love Waits” campaign, which promotes chastity among teens – and which got millions of young people signed up – produced on average a delay of only about 1-2 years in the first sexual experiences of young people: they were now having sex at 18 instead of 16 1/2! Something, but not quite what the program designers had in mind!

2) See Yourself

Paul knows that human will-power approaches don’t make enough difference, and he wants the Christians to do something more profound. He wants them to see themselves differently. He wants change to start from the inside as they “set their hearts” and “set their minds” on a new vision of their lives. In this, of course, he echoes Jesus, who taught that outer observances have little value in God’s sight; what he wants are hearts that love him. Not committing murder is fine, but hate in the heart is as bad. Avoiding adultery is good, but nurturing lust is just as bad.

The greatest of American theologians from the days of the evangelical “awakenings,” Jonathan Edwards, wrote in the 1700s that if you want to know whether someone is truly converted, look at their “affections.” See what they love, what they set their hearts on. Paul wants the Colossian Christians to recognize that as the Age to Come has invaded their lives, it has created a new status for them. If they have joined themselves to Jesus by faith, they have “died with Christ” and have also been “raised with Christ.”

They are now citizens of the Kingdom of God, people in whom the new Age has already begun, and therefore in some real sense are “dead” to the Present Age and the pagan practices of their past. They need to see themselves that way; to think of themselves as having a new and “hidden life” that belongs to the Age to Come. Their calling now is to “set their hearts” and “set their minds” on the development of that hidden life. And to reassure them that this is worthwhile, Paul reminds them that this new life is safe, secure, guaranteed, “hidden with Christ in God.”

This means many things. The new life is in important ways invisible; you cannot by casual observation tell who has new life, eternal life, spiritual life within them. In so many ways they live just as everyone else does: they too work and eat and sleep and raise families and suffer diseases. But hidden in them is new life, a new set of inclinations, new affections, new priorities, new hopes and dreams. Hidden inside them is the Age to Come!

One day, says Paul, all that will be revealed – on the day when Jesus himself “appears” in all his power and glory. Then it will become clear who was driven by what, whose hearts and minds were set on what goals, and the fruit of those desires will be on show for all to see. We will be amazed at the fruitful lives that were hidden from view in this age. We will be astonished as we hear God’s “Well done, good and faithful servant. You did well with what I gave you to look after – meager as it seemed at the time. Now enter the joy of your Master and work on bigger things.” As we might say today, “You did well in playing the hand I dealt you. Well done! Nobody else knew what your particular but invisible gifts and burdens were, but you did everything with them that I planned for you to do, with a willing heart and mind.”

2) Hidden But Not Private

If we could see ourselves this way, says Paul, we would gladly turn our hearts and our affections toward God, realign our affections on him and his ways. And we would discover that our “hidden lives” with him were worth far more than the “private lives” we thought we were pursuing in the Present Age.

Too much of what we currently do, says Paul, is motivated by a corrupt self-centeredness. We need to realize that, in one sense, we are now “dead to all that,” and in another, that we still need to “put to death” those things within us. In language probably borrowed from the baptism of adult converts, Paul talks about “putting off” some attitudes and behaviors and “putting on” others that befit the Age to Come. We are told that after immersion baptism, symbolizing their “dying to sin with Christ” and their “rising to new life with Christ,” early believers put on new clothes.

That sense of the newness, of change in status, of the new demands that the new life brings, were not lost even in the so-called Dark Ages. There is a wonderful story of a Germanic tribe whose chieftain was converted to Christianity. That meant, of course, that everyone in the tribe would now embrace the faith. But at their baptisms, the warriors held their right hands high out of the waters; they did not want their “sword hands” baptized! So powerful was the sense that conversion and baptism make all things new!

As new people, says Paul, put off your old pagan practices. High on his list comes sexual immorality – not because that’s a Christian obsession, but because the Greco-Roman culture of the 1^st C., much like our own, was awash in unbridled sensuality. The Greek word “porneia” which Paul tells the Christians to put off is, of course, the root of our word pornography. In the 1^st C. it referred to all illicit sexuality; and the Christians had to “put it off” precisely because, as in our culture, it was considered “no big deal” in Greco-Roman culture. Adultery, pre-marital sex, pederasty, prostitution, were as widespread then as now, and thought as little of – as long as they did not go “too far.”

We live in a day where that is a major cultural problem and where Christians are little or no different from others; where unmarried people live openly together without social penalty, where adultery is common, where homosexual practice is considered unexceptional. I have women come to me complaining about their husbands’ addiction to pornography; it is an issue right here in our “respectable” community.

But lest you think that illicit sex is the worst of our problems, let me remind you of what else Paul tells Christians to “put off.” That includes the inner sins of greed, coveting, malice, bigotry; and the outer ones of slander, lies, and overt prejudice. They are as prevalent in the 21^st C. as in the 1^st. Some of them are epidemic in our culture, as we have discussed in previous weeks: greed and coveting, encouraged because they are the driving force in our consumer economy; malice and bigotry directed against anyone sufficiently “different” from us – you can make your own list of them! Slander and lies, the currency of too much of our political life. To escape these influences from our debased culture requires real re-thinking by Christians.

3) Called To Community

We are, as Christians, called to live in community, in harmony, in peace with other people – and especially with those with whom we share “hidden lives in Christ.”

So we should strive to “put on” the new clothes of the Age to Come: kindness, gentleness, compassion, humility, patience. We ought to be forbearing with one another. Nobody suggests that is easy – and Paul, I think, would have been first to agree that he was not easy to be around! But forbearance and some degree of humility are essential to community, and forgiveness is essential to relationships. I often tell couples I am marrying that a good marriage is marked by forgiveness; not by forgetting, but by the conscious decision not to let the real hurts of the past stand in the way of a better future together. In a word, love one another, because “love covers over a multitude of sins.”

Love springs from the fertile soil of grace; it is one expression of the gratitude we feel and must express to those who have been good to us – especially when we do not deserve it. That means first and foremost loving God because he has first loved us. It also means loving the people who have loved us. The only possible response to grace is gratitude shown by a generous love.

And that response has to show itself in the way we do everything. As people already living out in part the life of the Age to Come, we should do all things with thankfulness to God and with a motivation and a manner that honors Jesus Christ. “Whatever you do, in word or deed, do it in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Do not neglect to build up, to nurture, to feed, your “hidden life.” You need Christian teaching, Christian worship, Christian fellowship. You cannot grow alone, and you do need to grow! At times, we can all sense that we are not making progress in our Christian lives; that we are too much like the world, too stuck in our ways, show too little holiness. We can easily get defeated at this point, unless we remember who we are. We are people joined to Jesus by faith, people in whom the “hidden life” of Christ resides; people whose true life is secure in God’s hands.

So let us remember that we belong to him, that we are “bought with a price,” and then “set our hearts and minds” on becoming in life what we already are by faith.

Let us pray...