Transcription
FERGUSON: Well, as we settle together, I want to ask you to turn in your bibles to Paul's letter to the Colossians and to chapter 2 and through to chapter 3. In fact, from chapter 2 verse 6 through to chapter 3 verse 16, which may be one of the longest texts that anyone has ever tried to expound at a Ligonier conference.
But I'm not going to read the whole passage, but I do want us in this closing session to camp down on the teaching that Paul gives us here in Colossians 2 through 3 on this closing theme of sanctification. And before I do that, I think you would want me, I'm sure the teaching fellows and the others who are sharing the ministry with us would want to thank Chris Larson for his leadership and also the many members Ligonier staff who have served us—Just hold your applause for the end please because there are so many. The technical people who make this function. The translators who communicate and improve our messages as they're broadcast to other countries in the world. And, if you saw what we see behind the scenes, you would think this conference is like an amazing illustration of the providence of God. That behind the scenes there are all kinds of complexities taking place. And yet at the end of the day, everything seems to work together for our good, as we gather together to love God in this way.
Well, I had originally hoped that this morning I might have a short text and originally gave to the translators a short text. But as the conference has gone on, I’ve been drawn back to Colossians 2 to 3 for a number of different reasons, and perhaps I should explain them to you. The first is that while this passage doesn’t teach us everything that we need to learn about sanctification, it is hugely instructive. And I think what may be especially helpful to some of us is the fact that it was written by the Apostle Paul to a company of relatively new believers who had apparently never met him. And so, what he’s doing for them is giving them a basic picture of what it means to be a Christian, and it is a most glorious picture. And this is why he says in chapter 2, verses 6 and 7, “You remember how you received Christ by faith, so continue to walk in Him, rooted and built up in Him, established in the faith, just as somebody else taught you, and do that abounding in thanksgiving.” So, there is instruction here for those of us who feel that we are relatively young Christians, and—I’ve had the privilege of speaking to a number of you—this is a part of Scripture to which we can return in order to be built up in our most holy faith.
But there’s another element of it that seems to me to be particularly helpful in our own time, and that is that the Apostle Paul is writing about sanctification, not just in an instructive way, but in a protective way. And if you read on in chapter 2, you’ll notice that he is profoundly concerned about false teaching. And I suspect that false teaching was pressing in on the Colossians by teachers who said something like this: “the Apostle Paul’s teaching was not wrong, but it wasn’t sufficient. And if you want to experience the fullness of spiritual life, then you need to listen to us.” And this is the reason why that word “fullness” recurs a number of times in Paul’s teaching, where he emphasizes that the fullness of spiritual life is not to be found in the dictates of these false teachers. And you’ll see some of them later on in chapter 2, in verses 16 through 19—questions of food and drink and festivals and new moons and Sabbaths, and an ascetic way of life, and being interested in angels and being fascinated with visions. And you can sense that what these Colossians are at least in danger of being taught, if they are not actually at the time being taught, is that there is a higher Christian life than the Apostle Paul has taught them. And I think that’s protective for us, because that kind of message is constantly with us. It plagued the Reformers. It plagued the seventeenth-century Christians in our countries. It plagued Christians in the eighteenth century, nineteenth century, and in some ways, in the late twentieth century. It exploded onto the evangelical scene, that you need something plus: “It’s okay to have Christ, but you need what only we can give you. And so, he’s not only instructing them, but he’s protecting them. And in the process of this passage, that’s instructive and protective; I think we would all recognize it’s also gloriously comprehensive. And in that sense, no matter how long we may have been in the Christian way, there is a refresher course here in Colossians 2 and 3 in what it means to be a Christian, in what sanctification is, and what it looks like in the Christian life.
The Master’s is on just now, and I suppose on Thursday, Jack Nicklaus started the Master’s as an honorary starter. And I have never forgotten reading in a book I bought for one of our children—I think it was called Play Golf My Way—how Jack Nicklaus introduces it by saying that at the beginning of every golf season, this man, who was then the greatest golfer in the world, would go to his teacher with a golf club in his hand and say to him, “Mr. Grout, teach me how to play golf.” And what he was really interested in was that the fundamentals of his golf were in place and were reliable. And those who follow such things with the super technology there is today, you will notice that some of these professional golfers, who have a golf club in their hands forty or more hours a week, that one of the things they are constantly doing is checking their grip, checking their grip, checking their grip, because they understand that a slight deviation in their grip—this is not meant to be a golf lesson, but a slight deviation in their grip will mean a large deviation in what happens to the golf ball. And I think if we can use that analogy, what Paul is saying to us here is, “Colossian Christians, Christians everywhere, make sure you are frequently having a refresher course in how to live the Christian life, and be frequently checking your grip.”
And all I want to try and do this morning, as we look at this passage, is to draw out from what Paul is saying, out of the rich personal and pastoral value of his teaching here, I want to draw out five principles embedded in these verses that help us to understand how God, through His Word, sanctifies us. You remember the other day, David Strain referred to John 17:17, “Your word is truth. Sanctify them through the truth.” And how, at the same time, the Apostle Paul speaks about the fact that “we are being transformed ultimately into the likeness of Jesus Christ, and this comes to us from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” And so, the Scriptures constantly combine the influence of the Word and the hands of the Holy Spirit. And the whole function of biblical teaching and preaching and exposition is that, like theater nurses, we are able to give clean medical instruments to the Holy Spirit as we handle the Word, so that He may do His spiritual surgery in order, spiritually, to heal us. And so, I want us to try to see in these verses this instruction that Paul gives, and to, as I say, articulate five of the principles that he uses.
The first of them, and the foundational one, if I can put it this way, is that every Christian believer needs to understand the nature of his new or her new identity in Christ. What happens to us when we become Christians? Many of us tend to focus on what we receive in terms of the forgiveness of sins. But when Paul expounds this, he teaches us that most fundamentally, what happens to us when we come to Christ by faith is that we are united to Him in order that we may receive from Him by the Spirit everything there is in Him for us. So, you remember how Paul puts this in 2 Corinthians 5:17, that in many of our translations is translated, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.” But what Paul more literally says is, “If anyone in Christ, new creation.” And he’s not only thinking about the transformation, the newness that we experience subjectively; he’s speaking about the fact that when we are united to Christ, we have walked into a new world altogether. We belong to a new society. We have emigrated, as it were, to a new country. And what the gospel will enable us to do is to live in the old country as members of that new country, because we are united to the king of the country into which we have entered, and all of his riches become instantaneously and immediately ours. Everything that He has done for us becomes part of our identity. And Paul works at this in these verses in a more comprehensive way than anywhere else in his writings. And if I can summarize what he says is this: if you trust in Jesus Christ, if you’re united to Jesus Christ, you have died with Him. You have been buried with Him. You have been raised with Him. You have been exalted with Him. You are seated with Him in heavenly places. And when He comes again, you will be with Him. You are inseparably bound to Jesus Christ in everything that Jesus Christ has done for you, and therefore that is what shapes your identity.
Paul says the same thing in different language in Romans 5:12 through to Romans 6:14, when, you remember, he says essentially, by nature we are in Adam, united to Adam, so that everything in which Adam has failed has become ours. But now by grace, we have been translated into a new family, a new kingdom. We have a new King. We are now in Christ. And he goes on to say, in the beginning of chapter 6, do you not know what that means? Do you not understand that that means in Christ, you have died to the reign of sin over you? Although you are not yet free from the presence of sin in you, you have died to the reign of sin over you. And therefore, the great imperative in your Christian life is that you should not let sin reign over you, since you are now in Jesus Christ. And brothers and sisters, the important thing for us to understand is that, just as Paul says we first of all received Christ for justification by faith before the power of justification was ever released into our consciousness, in the same way we are to receive these truths about ourselves by faith. And as we do so, their power will begin to be released into our lives: that we have died to the reign of sin. We have emigrated to the country of Jesus Christ. And since this is our new identity, everything about us changes.
For many years, Bob Godfrey, who is an amazing reader, has been encouraging my wife and myself to read Russian novels. And my wife was, and is, a devotee of the novels of Dostoevsky. And he had the audacity to argue with my wife that Leo Tolstoy was actually a greater novelist. And I, as a wise man, have stayed out of these controversies. But at last, my wife has persuaded me that Dostoevsky is at least worth hearing, and so I’ve been listening to The Brothers Karamazov. But there is something I knew about Dostoevsky. I knew that as a young man, Dostoevsky was involved in a little group of men who were accused, essentially, of treason against the Tsar, of which he was found guilty and sentenced to death. And on the 22nd of December 1849, Fyodor Dostoevsky was taken out, clothed in a shroud ready for the burial, and was within moments of execution when the commutation of his sentence came from the Tsar. And it was after that that he wrote the greatest of his novels. And everyone whom I’ve ever read talking about Dostoevsky says it was that that transformed his novels. You cannot have been conscious that, for all practical purposes, you have now died, and for all practical purposes, you have been raised again from that certain death and remain the same person you once were. And what Paul is saying here is that is what is true of us as Christians, because we are in Christ, and in Christ the reign of sin has been broken. Yes, sin continues to dwell in us, but we battle against it, not from more-or-less hope that I may conquer it, but from the knowledge that we are no longer under its reign. It no longer has authority over us, and by the power of the Spirit we can wrestle with it and overcome it. But you see, the whole point here is that we need to understand that we are in Christ.
I read the Bible for years before, as a teenager, I was brought to a living faith. And I remember as a youngster being very puzzled by what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 12:2, when he says, “I know a man in Christ who once had this amazing vision.” I often used to wonder, who is this man in Christ that Paul knew? Until eventually—now, Scots people live in a cold climate, and the brain works slowly, but yes, eventually it dawned on me—he’s actually talking about himself. And the moment I saw that, I began to notice that he’s always talking this way, that his basic way of talking about what we now are is not to say, “You are a Christian.” Right? Only three times in the New Testament the word “Christian” is used, as far as I can see. It is almost certainly a pejorative term, used by those who were against Christians, like the use of the word “Puritan” in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. And that for Paul, if you had said to him, “Are you a Christian?” he might have said, “Well, that’s how people describe me, but if you want me to describe myself, then have you not noticed that punctuating all of my letters is this notion that those who trust in Christ are united to Christ in such a way that all that He has done for them begins to be activated in their lives?” And the tragedy, brothers and sisters, in my own view and observation, is that probably most evangelical Christians have never once thought about themselves fundamentally as people who are in Christ and therefore have been given a wholly new identity out of which they live their lives. But when you see it, it becomes the foundation that transforms everything. So, principle number one is that this passage helps us to understand our new identity in Christ.
Principle number two is that that becomes the foundation for the development of a new mentality about our relationship to Christ. You’ll notice Paul’s imperatives at the beginning of chapter 3, where our English translations use the word “if,” that seems to me to be what the grammarians call “a first conditional.” That is, “if” means “since.” So, since this is true of you as Christians, you should think about yourself this way. So “if you have been raised with Christ, then seek the things that are above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God, and set your minds on the things that are above.” And we are all familiar, I think, most of us anyway, familiar with what I sometimes call the grammar of the gospel: that the way the gospel works in our lives, the way the Word of God works in our lives, is not simply by telling us more things we need to do because we are Christians, but by laying out before us the transformation that Christ, by the Spirit, through His Word, has produced in our lives, and then drawing out the implications of that. Often that’s put in grammatical terms: the way the gospel works is, the gospel presents us with the indicatives of grace, and on that basis, summons us to the imperatives of obedience. But I want you to notice that those two grammatical moods, as grammarians call them, have a third mood that we don’t have in the English language. There is an indicative mood: this is what God has done for you in uniting you to Christ. There is an imperative mood: this is therefore how you are to respond. But there’s also what I call a transitive mood, and that is, in the very way we are taught here in the Scriptures, we are able to see it’s not just a matter of knowing these things and then going off and doing them, but that the truth of the gospel has the power, in its exposition of our union with Jesus Christ, actually to bring us through the transition.
To use another golfing analogy, I remember taking one of our sons to a professional golfer I knew who was one of the best coaches in Scotland, because I could see that he was at this level, and he needed to get to what sports people call the next level. And I could see what that next level looked like. What I couldn’t see was how to transition him from this level to the next level. And I sat with my friend, the golf coach, for an hour and watched him transition my son from one level to another, so that I could hear the difference in the ball strike. And those of you who play contact sports with balls, you recognize the difference, the purity of the strike. And I remember thinking, as a minister, as a preacher, “Lord, would You build something into my ministry that does that, that not only has the indicatives—this is what is the case—and the imperatives—so get that case—but there’s something here in the way in which Paul speaks that enables the transition that he’s actually speaking about.” And that transition is a very interesting dynamic. He says, “Fix your minds, fix your hearts.” Language he uses here deals with the mind, but not the IQ. It deals with the mind, what we allow to fill our mind, and what we allow then to touch our affections. So, he’s saying there is this great truth of the gospel, that if you are a Christian, you are united to Jesus Christ in everything He has for you. So, as we fix our minds on that, that truth itself seems to work in a kind of reverse direction towards us, and warms our affections towards the Lord Jesus. And that, in turn, oils the wheel of our wills to do the will of God, and to discover in that will our perfect liberty. And it’s beautifully expressed here, that as we think of what is true of us, that we are united to Christ, that we’ve died in His death to the dominion of sin, we’ve been raised into newness of life, our true life is hidden with Christ in God; when Christ appears, we shall appear with Him. You see, that has a kind of reversing effect on our consciousness. It makes us think about ourselves and our identity in a wholly different way. It teaches us what a glorious thing it is actually to be a Christian. We thought we were coming to Christ for the forgiveness of sins, and we blessed God for it. What we didn’t realize was that the One who forgives our sins is also the Creator of the world, and the One who forgives our sins is also the One who says, “From now on, you’re united to Me in everything I’ve done for you.” And that warms the heart, doesn’t it?
Do you see what these false teachers were doing? They were saying, “Get your eyes on the angels. You need to try harder. There needs to be more asceticism. Christian life isn’t nearly difficult enough for you. There are all these things you need to do, all these principles”—those of the higher life. What were they? They were demonic diversions from the person of Jesus Christ and the glory of the identity of those who are united to Him. So that, as I say, Paul is teaching us here to understand our new identity, and the result of that is that we develop this new, life-transforming reality. He’s not saying to us, “Dig psychologically into your affections and do better.” He’s saying, “Set your minds on Christ. See Jesus Christ, your Savior and Lord, clothed in the gospel, and He will have that effect on your affections that will correspondingly lead to a greater love for Him.”
The third principle that he enunciates here—and this was touched on in the Q&A session earlier on—is that we need to learn to see the present life in the light of our final destiny. This is an amazing thing. Paul says, “You have died”—verse 3—“and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life (now) appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.” You see, he understands—the Apostle John says something similar. He says, “We are already the children of God. But it doesn’t yet appear what we shall be. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, because we will see him as he is.” Drawdown implication then: he says, “Everyone who has this hope in himself purifies himself.” It’s like an intuitive, instinctive fruit of knowing what your final destiny is. It transforms everything. This is why what Paul had written at the beginning of Romans 5 was so astonishing to his contemporaries: that we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God, and because of that, we are able to rejoice in our sufferings. And because we understand what God is doing through our sufferings, he says in Romans 5:11, we rejoice in God Himself. I mean, to the human mind, it is incomprehensible. But when you live your life backwards, as it were, when you allow your final destiny—“Your life is hidden with Christ in God”—it’s hidden from the world. The people who pass you in the street or in the office don’t look at you and instinctively think, “That person is a Christian.” And there are many times when you wonder about your own life, if you are showing any real evidences of being a Christian. Our true life may be hidden in the world, from the world, and at times even from ourselves. But here is the glorious star to which we need to look, and on the basis of which navigate our way through life: that when He appears, we shall appear with Him, and we shall be like Him. And surely, brothers and sisters, you sense the power of that truth when it grips you. If that’s who I am, if that’s true of me, it changes everything. And I learn to live in this world as somebody who belongs to another world.
But sadly, if we don’t think this way, we’re suffering from identity theft. In a crowd like this, there must be some of us who have experienced the horrors of identity theft and the difficulties of getting our identity back. I actually suffered identity theft with respect to my bank card, even before I arrived in my house. It had been stolen, and my bank assured me my identity was safe, until the next year, there came in a bill for something that my bank card had bought somewhere in Switzerland. And this is an amazing thing—really, about, a tragic thing here. Here are these false teachers that are hiding from these Colossians that in Christ they have fullness of life, and they’re stealing their identity. And yet it’s possible to be like me in a way that your identity was stolen from you even from the beginning, and you’ve never known this. And that’s why it’s so important. That’s why for Paul these teachings he’s given here are so important for the Colossians, and they’re surely also important for us.
There’s a fourth principle here. So, if you’re beginning to lose track, we need to learn to understand our new identity. We need to develop a new mentality. We need to see our present life in the light of our final destiny. And then the fourth principle here, that I think lies on the surface of what he goes on to say in chapter 3, verse 5, is that we need to learn to engage with indwelling sin—the indwelling sin that remains. We need to learn to engage with indwelling sin honestly. And Paul is very realistic about the fact that though we are delivered from the reign of sin over us, we are not yet delivered from the presence of sin in us. And what is of some interest to me is this, that what he does in these verses is he actually names the sin. Paradoxically, he names sins that elsewhere he says these things should not be spoken of among us. But I think what he’s driving at is this: unless I name the sin, I am not likely to secure victory over it. So long as I speak about the fact I know I’m a sinner, and I ask for forgiveness without specifying the way in which particular sin clings so closely to me, I will never find the employment of the resources that will deliver me. And we don’t have time for this—the last session of the conference is really the homework-giving session—but you’ll notice that Paul speaks about naming sin in our private life, and he deals with sexual matters in verse 5 following, and naming sin in our public life. And in verse 8, there’s a surprising emphasis on the tongue. You know, it really worries me that in our modern world, our youngsters are taught more to articulate vocally than to write. And so, it is great to have opinions, and it’s great to be able to express yourself—that’s what your education is meant to produce. But what Paul is saying is that those who are united to Christ seek not just to speak often, or to speak easily, but to speak well. And so, he speaks about the tongue, and the use of the tongue, and the way in which the tongue is connected to the heart. And the heart still has the remnants of indwelling sin in it. And he speaks, too, about the way in which we need—frankly, privately, we confess our private sin exclusively to the Lord—we need to learn to deal with our fellowship sin. And it’s very interesting in that context, you’ll notice in verse 9 following, that one of the things he says here is, “Don’t lie to one another.” And I think actually the language he uses is broader than lying through our mouths. It’s broad enough to encompass lying through our lives. And there is huge pressure, isn’t there? There is a kind of social pressure that can enter into our churches, where we pretend to be more spiritual than we are, pretend to be something we are not, or pretend not to be something that we actually are. And that destroys the church family. It means that when outsiders come in, they will see only a marginally improved version of the world in which they live. But when they see this open-heartedness towards one another, this honesty with one another—yes, we confess our private sins privately and not publicly—but don’t you love people that you feel you know who they really are? And aren’t your best friendships with those who know who you really are? And isn’t this what is in view in the family of the church? And isn’t it this that makes the church different from the office or the hospital or the school or the university or wherever you are, or the neighborhood? And Paul is encouraging that.
There was a movement a number of years ago that went under the tag “name it and claim it.” And I wanted to begin—I’m speaking tongue in cheek—I wanted to begin an organization that was called “name it and slay it.” Name it and slay it. And that’s why, if you look down at verse 5 here, you’ll notice that his verb is “put to death.” Put it to death. And you can only do that if you are honest about the presence of sin in your life. You know, the presence of sin in your life can do something to you that is pastorally unhelpful. I remember many years ago at a conference, a Christian conference, a physician engaged me in conversation after one of the sessions. It so turned out that his specialty was addiction recovery, and he said something to me that helped me enormously pastorally, not just thinking about the kind of addictions he was dealing with. He said, “You know, we find in our practice that there can be a time when we really feel the addiction has been broken.” So, an illustration here is somebody who is obese and has a food addiction, and we help them to break that food addiction. He said, “we have noticed time and time again that such a person may take eighteen more months before they stop thinking about themselves as an obese person trying to get thin and start thinking about their identity as a person of normal weight, maintaining that normal weight.” In other words, even how we think about ourselves can be an addiction, and this is why Paul is pressing so much on the principle, you need to learn how you should think about yourself as a Christian believer. And it’s not likely—although by God’s grace it may happen in a moment, at a Ligonier conference—but slowly, by God’s grace, you begin to realize who you really are in Christ. And because you know who you really are in Christ, and in Him you are accepted to the Father, and since you need hide nothing from Him, then you can deal with indwelling sin honestly.
And something very interesting happens at this point in Paul’s teaching. It’s almost imperceptible until you actually notice it’s happened. He’s teaching us that we need to understand our new identity in Christ. We need, in addition to that, to develop a new mentality. We need to see our lives in the light of our final destiny. We need to engage with indwelling sin honestly. And all of this is actualized in us when we’ve learned to devote ourselves to Christ’s supremacy. And in these closing verses, you’ll notice that all of the transition moves backwards to the Lord Jesus Christ. “Above all these things,” he says positively, “put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. And whatever you do, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus.”
One of the most serious mistakes I can make as a serious Christian seeking to deal with my sin is to think that mortification is sanctification. Paul is teaching us here that mortification is a necessary but not a sufficient path to sanctification. Because mortification is dealing with the sin that keeps us from Jesus, but sanctification is actually becoming like Jesus. And if we focus entirely on seeking to deal with our indwelling sin, without our gaze fixed on the Lord Jesus, then we’re in the same position as the situation in Jesus’ parable in Luke chapter 12 of the house that has been cleansed of a demon, but has no new furniture in place, and the demon just goes and gets a bundle of other demons stronger than he was, and the last state is worse than the first. And Paul is conscious that is exactly what this Colossian false teaching will do. And so, he says at the end here, fix your eyes on Jesus. Fix your eyes on Jesus—as Calvin calls it, fix your eyes on Christ clothed with His gospel—and put Him on. He’s really saying in long form what he would write to the Romans in Romans chapter 13, “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill its lusts.” And you see, what then happens is that we begin to do everything with gratitude and thankfulness. That’s so interesting, because thankfulness is one of the signs that you have been delivered from self-absorption, and you’ve been set free to glory in Jesus Christ. And this is why he ends this passage with some very simple practical counsel, doesn’t he? Sometimes you think that the frustrating thing about Paul is he tells you what the situation is, but he doesn’t give you any practical counsel. That really is nonsense. You just need to stay down with what he’s saying. What will help you here is this: that you let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your heart. The simplest elements in our congregating together have the function of, by the Spirit, touching our affections and raising them on high to the Lord Jesus Christ, and enabling us to do absolutely everything for the glory of God the Father in the name of the Lord Jesus.
And what is so interesting, actually, is that there’s a parallel passage, isn’t there, in Ephesians 5, when Paul speaks about what it means to be filled with the Spirit. Fascinating here, that he equates what in Ephesians he says is the fruit of the Spirit’s ministry in us with the fruit of the ministry of the Word of God in us, because in the economy of Jesus Christ, these two things belong together. And we’ve been sitting under that ministry of the Lord in these days, and by His grace, the Spirit has been using the Word to teach us the privileges that we have, to underscore for us the glorious destiny that is ours, and—until that day when we see Him face to face and are made like Him, and the promise of the word of Jesus that we will be with Him to see Him in His glory—and the ministry of the Holy Spirit working in our hearts to transform us from one degree of glory to another, until the Father’s eternal purposes are secured in our lives, and ultimately we are conformed to the image of His Son, and we become the firstborn of many brothers—until that day dawns, the gospel energizes us to live for His glory. And brothers and sisters, that’s your homework until the next Ligonier conference. Let’s pray together.
Heavenly Father, we thank You for these days. You’ve gathered us together. Thank You for those who have served us—we’ve seen some of them in the shadows—and we thank You for what they do behind the scenes. We pray for ourselves that, as we have been the recipients of so much, sitting under the ministry of the Word of these our brothers, that these days together may not only have been days of joy, companionship, reunion, but days in which, by what You have planted in us, the likeness of our Lord Jesus may grow in us and be seen through us, that many more may come and trust Him as, by Your grace, we have done. So, receive our thanksgiving today, in Jesus’ name. Amen.