Colossians 3:16 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 hearts to God. (ESV)
This article is my attempt to follow Colossians 3:16 without the singing part. This verse was written as part of a letter to the church at Colossae, specifically to those in Colossae who were believers in Jesus, and had been raised from spiritual death to life. I was thinking of a way to explain the resurrection of Jesus and the new life that believers have in Him, but Colossians 2:11-13 does it for us: “In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead. And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.” That “circumcision of Christ” is also called “the cutting away of your sinful nature” in the New Living Translation. So this is to people who’ve had their sins forgiven by faith in God’s power to raise them from spiritual death to spiritual life! They’ve repented by trusting in Jesus for life and salvation instead of trusting in anything else for life and glory and salvation.
Going back to the original verse, what kind of teaching is bad and what kind of teaching is good? I know that some of us have a self-righteousness radar that picks up a self-righteous tone in teaching right off the bat. Such a teacher can come to someone who’s deeply struggling within the depths of their soul, with agony in their eyes and strife in their heart, and prescribe an out of context verse like “I can do all things through Christ who strengths me” ((Philippians 4:13)) when they should have just given them a hug. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that God’s Word has enough power to change us. I just wrote that because it’s an experience I’ve definitely gone through and have seen others go through. On the other hand I’ve also seen the exact opposite. There are situations where someone needs badly to get rebuked and instead of being lovingly humbled by God, they get a pat on the back and their sin continues to be fed. What teaching is good and what teaching is bad? Well, it’s first things first. Before looking at how the dish is served, we have to look at the food itself. Bad teaching replaces Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection and faith in Him with anything else, from religion to good works, to visions, to ideas, to personal hopes and dreams.
Good teaching is also rooted in faith. It comes from a heart that has had Colossians 2:11-13 (quoted earlier) happen to it. It comes from a heart that believes that Jesus was raised from the dead and a mouth that confesses Him as Lord (Romans 10:9) and is thankful to God for it, like in the end of the first verse I quoted. This heart is thankful to God for the all encompassing love that he/she has received because he/she realizes that the love is so undeserved that it’s ridiculous, even scandalous. The humility is real because the gift of God remains a free gift, not something that is taken for granted or believed to be deserved. This frees us from pride because it allows us to teach and admonish each other in the context of any sin that the other person has done or is being tempted to do because we know that we’re really no better than them, even if we aren’t struggling with the same thing they are, and it’s actually legitimate, because we realize that we’re bad, like bad, bad–like horrible hell-bound bad, and not even in a funny way. We can face that truth head-on and not be suicidal, or give up on life, or try to make up our own rules for how to be good because God’s are too hard. We don’t have to just be people who have no hope because we are saved from our sin! It’s kind of like this: “remember that you were at that time separated from Christ . . . having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.” (Ephesians 2:12-13, with content skipped at the end) So if our brothers and sisters are gluttons, lazy, have lustful hearts, or have less culturally acceptable sins, we can teach them and be taught by them without rejecting the severity of the sin while at the same time not being self-righteous. We can even do this when people are sinning against us! It’s such a brilliant, ingenious plan! I can do it sometimes, but many times I still sway to one side or the other of either ignoring sin or being self-righteous. Our ability to do or not do this shows how much we’ve begun to understand and live the Gospel.
Good dishes can come from horrible servers, like the Pharisees presented in the gospels and the prophet Jonah. Jesus told his disciples about the Pharisees, “practice and observe whatever they tell you–but not what they do”. ((Mathew 23:3)) Jonah, after finally obeying God in His call for Jonah to go and call out against the great, rebellious city of Nineveh, traveled out to the city and yelled “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” ((Jonah 3:14)) The mind-blowing thing about this is that they were both speaking the powerful Word of God, the powerful reality of God, that if it was followed, those who followed it would actually be doing full-blooded righteous acts. This seems astonishing to me that Jesus allows His perfect commands to pass through the lips of those who probably don’t give them in love, but hey: He lets it happen. I don’t get God, but I can marvel at His hidden wisdom in this.
So what to do in the situation where we receive true teaching that is not given in love through faith in God? This is where we can get a glimpse of how the Gospel has changed us, or not changed us. Jesus said for his disciples to obey right teaching, even from the hypocritical, self-righteous Pharisees. Why? They’re self-righteous, annoying hypocrites, and they’re sinning by telling me something out of self-righteousness, instead of as something that they’ve received from God into their heart, accepted, and taught in love as a result. ((Galations 5:6)) I must ask myself other questions as well, though. What matters most to me? Do I care more about fixing the other person than I do about fixing myself? Is it more urgent that I see how it hurts my relationship with my Father and draws me farther from glorious, satisfying life with Him and closer and closer to the toilet bowl of sin and separation from God and therefore want to have that wrong made right, or is it more urgent that I look good and defend my basically non-existent righteousness and therefore tell the teacher their fault? The heart of the question is “do we care about what God thinks and feels about us more than we care about what other people think and feel about us?”
The point is that our standing with God is what’s at stake in life. Where are you at with God? The question we more often ask ourselves is “where am I at with someone/thing instead of God?” When my eyes are focused on myself, I get selfish and think less of God. This happens all the time At times it has happened when I’m idle and/or lazy. For those who’ve been graciously chosen by God to be His kids, we get to have our eyes opened to see God rightly, as the one who cleaned us up and cancelled the record of debts, many debts!, against us. This is our salvation.
[1] Philippians 4:13
[2] Matthew 23:3
[3] Jonah 3:4
[4] Galatians 5:6
