Good morning. What a pleasure it is to see all of you here today. German Stau did its best to prevent me from being here today, but we made it after all. Today, we will continue a series in Colossians that we have been going through in the evening service together over the past few months. Earlier in chapter one, Paul greeted the Colossians and encouraged them in their Christian walk, sharing with them how he was praying for them. And then he transitioned into a beautiful exposition of the gospel and of the supremacy of Christ in the face of the false teaching that they had been encountering. Now in verses 24 through 29, We will see Paul speaking about his own ministry with all of its suffering and its labor and all of its power and its meaningfulness. We will see how this is not only or even mainly a passage about Paul and what he accomplished and how we should admire that, but rather meant to encourage us and to stir us on to also faithfully serve Christ in the place in which he has put us. So let us read the word of God together in Colossians chapter one, verses 24 through 29. This is the inspired, infallible, and errant word of God. Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, And in my flesh, I am filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is the church, of which I became a minister according to the stewardship from God that was given to me for you to make the word of God fully known. 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. Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me. Amen. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever. Let's pray. Father in heaven, we thank you for this day that you have given to us that we might gather together to study your word, to hear its father. We pray that you would work powerfully through these words of Paul that he wrote to the Colossians that you would make it come alive for us, that you would make it clear to us what its meaning is for us, and that through it, we might love you more and might be inspired to glorify you further in the way that we live our lives. We pray these things in the name of your Son, Jesus Christ. Amen. The sermon will be divided up into three different points. Firstly, the suffering of Paul. Secondly, the message of Paul. And thirdly, the work of Paul. Again, that's the suffering of Paul, the message of Paul, and the work of Paul. As the Apostle Paul wrote the letter to the Colossians, rejoicing in their faith, correcting them in their errors, and illustrating the wondrous sufficiency of Christ and the incredible truth of the gospel. He was not sitting next to a fireplace in a comfortable chair surrounded by books. He was not writing from his office in Tarsus Theological Seminary. He was not typing up the first draft of a letter on a MacBook in his favorite coffee shop. Instead, Paul was most likely literally chained to a Roman guard, imprisoned as he awaited trial in Rome. Yet in verse 24, as he pivots from speaking about the supremacy of Christ and his work in the Colossians to his own Christian experience, he does not indulge himself in self-pity or bitterness. No, in fact, he does quite the opposite. He says that he takes joy in his suffering. I think we all know from our own experience and from that of others that there is no reaction to suffering that is more foreign to the human instinct than joy. Anger, sadness, desperation, frustration, These are the things that we expect to see from someone who is in the midst of pain and difficulties. Maybe we can imagine, and the ancient Romans did, since it is from their philosophers that we get the word, that someone could be stoic in the face of suffering. That is, I believe that the British say that maintaining a stiff upper lip or acting as if their suffering is indifferent to them or doesn't even earn their notice. Yet in this passage, Paul surpasses even this. He shows neither a negative reaction to a suffering nor a neutral or apathetic reaction, but a positive one. This should lead us to ask two questions. First, why does Paul find joy in his suffering? And secondly, how does he find joy in his suffering? For the answer to both of these questions, we can look to what Paul says and writes in Romans chapter five, verses three through five. We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope. And hope does not put us to shame because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. So it is not in the things causing the suffering that Paul finds joy. He did not find the feeling of rocks being thrown at him until he was near death to be particularly pleasant. He did not get a nice adrenaline rush when he was shipwrecked on Malta. He didn't find imprisonment to be fulfilling in and of itself. But rather, it is what God was doing through his suffering that Paul found joy in. For he knew that suffering produces endurance, that endurance produces hope, produces character, and that character produces hope. Not a hope that wishes for something but is not sure it will come to pass, but a sure and certain hope. A hope in Christ, in his return, in our resurrection, and in glory in eternity. And this knowledge was not only why Paul found joy in suffering, but also how he could. I think many of us here could say that we know theoretically that we should find joy in our suffering, yet we find it virtually impossible to do so. Yet Paul shows us that in order to accomplish this, we must lift our eyes beyond the dark and dreary present to the horizon. the horizon where we can glimpse the dawn of, yes, the end of our temporary sufferings, but even better, the beginning of our eternal bliss. Paul continues the letter by saying, and in my flesh, I am filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church. This is one of the more difficult passages in Paul's writings. There have been many different interpretations, even differing interpretations within the Reformed tradition of which we are a part. Yet there is one path that we must be sure not to take. That is to say here that Paul means that in some way Christ's death was insufficient, that it was in some way lacking, and must be completed by our sufferings or efforts. This is the approach taken by many in the Catholic Church, and it is one that strikes at the very heart, the very core of the gospel. Indeed, if that was Paul's meaning here, He would be contradicting his own words earlier in verse 22 of this chapter of Colossians, where he says that we are reconciled in his, that is Jesus's, body of flesh by his death so that we can be presented holy and perfect. So what does Paul mean here? There are two main schools of thought. Firstly, some hold that Paul is speaking about the amount of suffering that has been ordained by God for the church before the return of Christ. According to these commentators, since we are members of Christ in our sufferings, we are completing what God has ordained for the spiritual body of Christ. John Calvin draws upon this to say that this ought to bear up our minds and comfort them in afflictions, that it is thus fixed and determined by the providence of God that we must be conformed to Christ in the endurance of the cross and that the fellowship that we have with him extends to this also. This view finds support in verses such as 1 Thessalonians 3, verses two through three, where Paul says, we sent Timothy, our brother, and God's coworker in the gospel of Christ to establish and exhort you in your faith that no one be moved by these afflictions, for you yourselves know that we are destined for this. Other commentators take this to mean that while Christ's suffering and sacrifice satisfied God the Father, it did not satisfy the world and Satan. The commentator William Hendrickson puts it this way, they, that is the world, hated Jesus with insatiable hatred and wanted to add to his afflictions. But since he is no longer physically present on earth, their arrows, which are meant especially for him, strike his followers. It is in that sense that all true believers are in his stead supplying what, as the enemies see it, is lacking in the afflictions which Jesus endured. This theory can draw on passages such as Mark 13, 13 for support where Jesus says that you will be hated by all for my name's sake. So which of these interpretations is correct? I personally believe that both of them correspond with the clear testimony of the rest of scripture and that it is quite possible that Paul is referring to both. However, I think that the first explanation, that it is what we as the body of Christ are destined for, that it's more compelling, as it seems unlikely that Paul would write such a passage in the middle of this letter, focusing on a non-Christian's point of view. And the idea of the individual believer's suffering Filling up what is lacking in the suffering of the spiritual body of Christ corresponds well with what Paul writes in verse 27 about Christ being in us. But regardless of which comes closer to Paul's original intent, the implications for us are clear. The sufferings and persecutions that we face in this life are not an accident. They are ordained and limited by God in order that we might through them be sanctified and be shaped more and more into the image of his son. And they have an ordained set end point. There will be a time where there will be no more pain, no more tears, and where we will bask in the glory of God forever. time where the darkest valleys through which we have passed will seem like a distant memory and where we will overflow with awe and thankfulness towards God for how he masterfully orchestrated every single second of our lives in such a way that brought us to that moment. In verses 25 through 27, we will see our second point, that is the message of Paul. Let's look at those verses again together. The church of which I became a minister according to the stewardship from God that was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, the mystery hidden for ages and generations, but now revealed to his saints. The story of how Paul went from being a persecutor and one of the greatest opponents of the church to being an apostle is one of the greatest transformation stories in history. And it is partially because of this history that Paul is able to say that he is a minister according to the stewardship from God that was given to me for you. God's appointment of Paul was explicit, verbal, and specific. And it was an appointment for a specific reason, to preach the gospel, especially to the Gentiles. The mystery that Paul speaks of here is not referring to a Sherlock Holmes style mystery where there is a problem or situation where no one really knows or possesses all the facts. Nor is it referring to some special secret knowledge that only some possess or are capable of possessing. No, in fact, Paul's usage of the term throughout the New Testament, he is referring to, as William Hendrickson puts it, a person or a truth that would have remained unknown had not God revealed him or it. In this case, that person is Christ, and that truth is the gospel of Jesus Christ. Throughout the Old Testament, the figure of the Messiah and the promise of the new covenant are foreshadowed more and more clearly the further you progress from Genesis to the latest of the prophets. Yet it was still a shadow. No one could really fully understand it or know exactly what it would look like. With the coming of Christ, His birth, life, death, and resurrection, the mystery was revealed. The shadow became real, tangible, and knowable. The gospel in all of its glorious wonder was fully revealed and openly preached, it was truly the beginning of a new age. And this fully revealed mystery was no longer mainly reserved for just the Jewish people. As Paul says, 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. To us, this now probably seems obvious. Of course, God's grace is not confined to one ethnic group or one particular location on the earth. But to the Jews of the day, it was far from obvious. And to many, it seemed outright heretical. Yet the revealing of this mystery did not come out of the blue or out of thin air. Rather, the shadows of this truth can be seen throughout the Old Testament. We can see this in the Pentateuch, where God tells Abraham, And in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice. And in the Psalms, I will cause your name to be remembered in all generations. Therefore, nations will praise you forever and ever. And in the prophets, such as the passage in Isaiah, where God says to Israel, I am the Lord. I have called you in righteousness. I will take you by the hand and keep you. I will give you as a covenant for the people, a light for the nations. After thousands and thousands of years where God worked predominantly through one people group in one location, now the gospel is preached to and believed by people from every tongue, tribe, and nation throughout the world. The words that Paul uses to explicitly describe this mystery are full of beautiful meaning. Christ in you, the hope of glory. How sweet those words must have sounded to the Colossian Christian, buffeted by the winds of a false teaching that implied that Christ was not sufficient and that their salvation stood on a precarious foundation. Paul here tells them that Christ is in them. And because of that, they have a hope of glory. Christ is not incidental to the gospel. He is not just a path to salvation. He is in need of no compliment or addition in order to be sufficient for your salvation. He is the gospel. He is the way and the truth and the life. He is absolutely sufficient for salvation. He is enough. Faith in Him as your sole and sufficient Savior is the only way in which you might be saved. You must be united to Christ in faith. And it is because of this union that we have with Christ that we have our great hope. A hope that, as we looked at earlier, is certain of fulfillment. We can look forward with certainty to the fact that when we come face to face before God Almighty, the one who created heaven and earth, who ordains all things, can do all things, knows all things, sees all things, that God who we have sinned against with our every waking breath, whose laws and commands we have never come close to fulfilling, we can say, as Elvina and Paul did in the famous hymn, Jesus paid it all, all to him I owe. Sin had left a crimson stain. He washed it white as snow. That brings us to the third point, which we will find in verses 28 and 29, the work of Paul. In verses 28 and 29, Paul outlines the work in which he was engaged. the work that resulted in the suffering, and that was joyfully born for the sake of this glorious message. Let's look at those verses again together. Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me." Firstly, we can see here that Paul describes his work as having three different components, proclaiming, warning, and teaching. What was Paul proclaiming? The gospel, of course. The book of Acts is chock full of stories of Paul preaching in synagogues, preaching in the streets, and preaching before rulers that he was brought before for trial. Paul was tireless in his drive to make the good news known to as many as humanly possible. He did not let himself be held back by imprisonment or injury, deprivation or danger. He scoffed at fear of men and their opinions of him. He proclaimed the risen Christ to the Pharisees who had trained him to hunt down Christians and to the most world-wise Athenian philosophers. How often do we do the same? How often do we let fear of consequences or fear of what others think prevent us from sharing the good news of Jesus Christ, of salvation from eternal damnation with those who are so desperately in need of it? Next, Paul says that he warned everyone. What does he mean by this? The word that the ESV here translate as warned is translated by the NASV and the NIV as admonishing. The same Greek word is used in Acts chapter 20, verse 31, where Paul, while speaking to the elders at Ephesus says, therefore be alert, remembering that for three years, I did not cease night or day to admonish everyone with tears. and later in Colossians in chapter three, verse 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. Here, Paul seems to be speaking of something that is absolutely vital to the church, that is calling wayward Christians to repentance and encouraging believers onward in sanctification. The word everyone in these verses clearly does not literally apply to everyone, as Paul was limited to one location at a time, but this does apply to the church in general and to all who are a part of it. It is a work that is in its greatest parts required of pastors and elders to use the staff of discipline to pull their flock away from danger and to care tenderly for them when they are weak or injured. This is something that I know from the testimony of pastors is incredibly difficult. Indeed, we see from the testimony of Paul when he says that he did not cease night or day to admonish everyone with tears. And it is the duty of the members of a church to submit themselves to this care, to heed rebuke and to respond to exhortation, to not make this duty more difficult for their shepherds than it needs to be. But it is not just the duty of pastors and elders. It also belongs to all of us to rebuke the brother or sister who is in sin, to encourage the one who is struggling, to exhort the one who is complacent. What a beautiful thing it is when a church really takes this to heart, truly admonishing one another in all wisdom, caring for each other, and making sure that no one is left behind. Finally, Paul describes how he has been teaching everyone with all wisdom. Here again is the great duty of the pastor, the teaching elder, as well as ruling elders and deacons, the exposition of the word of God, the instruction of the congregation in sound and orthodox theology, the explanation of the law of God and how it applies to us. All these things are involved in this great work. Paul exemplifies this not only in the many accounts of his teaching and acts, but also in the many letters that he wrote to different churches or pastors, including this letter to the Colossians. But those of us who are not in full-time ministry can also take part in this task. Parents can and should teach their kids the things of God. They should catechize them, read the word with them, and raise them up in the way that they should go. Activities such as Sunday school, midweek Bible studies, family worship with your spouse and our visitors in the home, meeting up with a brother and sister in your church for coffee to talk about the things of God. All of these are also opportunities for Christians from all walks of life to pass on the wisdom that they have received to their brothers and sisters in Christ. And what is the end result of these three activities? Or to put it in a better way, what is the intended result while depending on the Holy Spirit to do the necessary internal work? Well, it is, as Paul says, in order that we may present everyone mature in Christ. Our goal as believers in our own personal lives and as a church for each of our members is to grow in holiness, to grow in sanctification, to become more like our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ each and every day. Yes, we do not do it on our own. The Holy Spirit is intimately involved. Yes, it will never be fully complete until the day of glory, but it is the goal that we must strive towards, for it is what we are called to by our Heavenly Father, the One who created us, the One who sustains us, and the One who saved us. Yet after studying the life of Paul and what he writes here, and reading the words of Jesus where he says in Matthew chapter five, verse 48, that you therefore must be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect. It is easy to feel overwhelmed. Yes, we might know that our salvation is not dependent on our works. Yes, we might know that our sanctification will be eventually perfected in glorification. Yet still, this call to holiness, this call to proclaim the gospel, to admonish one another, to teach in all wisdom, and to actually be perfect, it is hard not to have a sense of preemptive exhaustion set in. We know ourselves. We know how weak and frail we are. We know how often we fail on a day-to-day, hour-by-hour basis. How can we have any hope of succeeding in this, in our own strength? Praise be to God that we don't have to. We see the answer to this dilemma in what Paul writes in verse 29. For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me. Paul acknowledges this is not easy. He says that he toils, he struggles with his work, painfully aware of his own insufficiency. Yet he also recognizes that he is not alone. The Holy Spirit was working within him, giving him supernatural energy for the task that was at hand. While Paul was different from us in that he was an apostle, something that none of us can ever be, he was not unique in this sense. We are all indwelled by the Holy Spirit. All of us can find our help, our rest, our support, our strength, our energy in the God who made all things and loves us deeply and individually. He is also aware of our limitations. And as Christ says, what father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent? If we lean on God in our times of weakness and seek his help in doing what he has called us to do, our prayers will not return void. He will help us. Jesus was not bluffing when he said that it was better for the disciples that he should return to his father and that the Holy Spirit should come to them as a helper. Think on that for a moment. We have the Holy Spirit, a person of the Godhead, as our helper. Let this embolden us to step forward into the work that God has called us to, confident that he will not leave us exposed or unsupported, but rather will be there alongside us, strengthening us far beyond what we could ever be by ourselves. So therefore, let us take this passage and let it work within us. Let us rejoice in our sufferings, trusting that God has a purpose in them and that he has already prepared their end. Let us faithfully and actively proclaim the gospel, having confidence in Christ that he is in us and looking forward to glory with a firm and sure hope. And let us toil for the sake of Christ, steadfast in the knowledge that we cannot and must not do anything in our own strength, but can and must rely on him to provide that which we lack. Let's pray together. Father in heaven, we thank you for this word that you have given to us today, for the way that you have used Paul to speak into the situation of Christians throughout the centuries. Lord, we pray that we would really take this with us in this coming week in our life as we walk forward, that we would encounter suffering with joy, that we could proclaim the gospel faithfully and continuously to those around us, and that we would strive to live a life that glorifies you. not in our own weak and faltering strength, but in your strength that you so freely give unto us. Lord, we thank you for your goodness and grace that you show to us each and every day. We pray these things in the name of your Son, Jesus Christ. Amen.