Well, if you take your Bibles, we are working through the book of Colossians. And we started Colossians 1 last week. I think I was a little bit ambitious and I said to put into the bulletin that we'd be going from verses 3 to 14, but there's no way that we are doing that today. Lord willing, we'll go through verses 3 to 8. I can read that before we begin. We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, would 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 does also 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." Now, if you were the Apostle Paul in prison in the year AD 62, about there, and were met with someone claiming to be a pastor evangelist, what would impress you about his explanation and encourage you to pray for the work that he's done, even to write a letter to that church? Would it be if the man said to Paul, I've gone up and down the Lycus River, and through my preaching, churches are popping up everywhere. Rich ones, too. Or... Thank you very much for that Shania Twain reference. Or... If he said something like this, the Lord has blessed the preaching of the gospel and the three churches so that three churches along the Lycus have been planted. And although there is the threat of false teaching near Colossae, they remain strong in their faith in Christ, showing the love of the Spirit because of their hope of heaven. Faith, hope, and love. What makes Paul pray? That's what we're going to examine this week. And I thought that, as I said, that we were going to look at all of verses 3 to 14 and think about, consider about what he has to pray about. But I think the content of the prayer will be next week. I didn't want to ascend and descend Mount Kilimanjaro in one go. So, Paul is in prison and he hears from this fellow slave in preaching the gospel, a minister of Christ on their behalf, about the work that God has done. And Paul connects it, as we're going to see, with the broader work that God is doing. a fruitful and increasing work that God is doing throughout the whole known world at that time. And it is God working that fruitfulness in the Lycus River and it is the Lord at work in this. How does he see, what is the evidence that this is a work of God and thus what provokes Paul to pray and pray earnestly He says, always thanking God for them. And so we see it was based on something that he heard. He repeats this again. He says in verse four, since we heard of this, and in verse nine, which is why I was thinking of going through the whole dedication of the letter here, in verse nine, from the day we heard We have not ceased to pray for you. Those two passages are connected in the context. Paul heard report of what God was doing and the measure that this was actually something from God was not as I said that these were rich churches. Now Colossae was something by the time of the first century that wasn't necessarily as rich. as it had been in its former days of glory. Laodicea and Hierapolis, though, were bigger locations. Nevertheless, it has nothing to do with the amount of people or the amount of money. It has nothing to do with the bigness of the church. But it is the quality of the church that Paul looks at. It is that that gives off the scent that this is a very true work of God. And he focuses on three things. Number one, he had, that is, Epaphras had preached Christ to them, preaching the gospel of Christ. They had heard in the word of truth in the gospel this message that God sent his son to redeem sinners from the deadly effects of their sins, but not just the deadly effects, the bane of sin itself. That that is a thing that creates that hostility between God and man. Sin is the reason why there's a problem between God and the soul. God has made a way to remedy that. God has sent his son to make propitiation for our sins. He has been sent to turn away God's anger from us in Christ being sacrificed in the sinner's place so that those that were formerly at odds, God and man, can be brought back together at one. Jesus has made atonement, atonement. But not only than that, not only this, but better than that, I should say, Christ is risen. There is no Savior in just a dead Savior. They had heard something that to the Greek ear would have been laughable, something that they would despise, that this body would be raised from the dead. And a Savior would be only in this resurrected man, Christ Jesus. But this was the essence of what they heard. They placed their faith in this, and it was because of that that then there are these three things that were produced. And we've already hinted at that, and that's faith, hope, and love. And this is a particularly Pauline thing. focusing on faith, hope, and love, this triple grace, like a three-legged stool holding up the Christian, a triad for the well-being, but not just the well-being of a Christian, the being of a Christian. You cannot be a Christian. unless you have faith, hope, and love. This could not be a work of God and evidence itself to be so unless there was faith, hope, and love. This is, and I would say this, this is a Trinitarian thing. There is faith in who? Jesus, the Son. And there is love in, who do we see in verse eight? Love in the Spirit. Now that leaves one person there. And I think that this is connected, at least in my mind, I don't think that it's heretical to say this, hope that is laid up for them in heaven. This is something reserved in heaven for the believers. Who does that? Who reserves our heavenly inheritance, our hope for the believer in heaven for us? It is the Father. The Father. We have faith in Christ Jesus, love in the Spirit. It is He who produces this love. Love is the fruit of the Spirit. And then hope reserved in heaven by the Father. I think a divine pass of God is implied as doing it. It's not like what we see in 1 Timothy 6, where those that are rich should be rich in good works and lay up for themselves a good foundation for the future, not something subjective, not something they are doing. But it would be much more in keeping with what 1 Peter 1, 4 says, that there is an inheritance we have been brought forth to born again to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you. And so this faith, this hope, and this love is from God. It is directed toward God, directed towards the persons of the Trinity. Now faith, hope, and love might also have past, present, and future connotations to them. We place our faith in Christ Jesus and what he has done, and we rest upon what he has done. We come to him definitively, once and for all, and we are then justified, and we are saved, and positionally we're sanctified. We are adopted. We are into God's family. That's something past. and has present and future implications. Love is something that is a present orientation, where we look around us and we see others that are loved by God, others that have been brought into God's family, and we relate to them in a loving way, doing good to those whom God has done good to, supremely so. And then hope is future-oriented. And Paul brings this out very clearly when he says in Romans 8, who hopes for what he sees? If we hope for what we do not see, then with patience we wait for it. Now, I don't want to preach a sermon now that I intend to preach at the very end of this series, looking at Colossians in context. in its corpus, Pauline corpus, the 13 letters, and in Covenant, the New Testament, and then in Canon, the whole Bible. I hope to do that. But I would at least like to travel around through Paul's letters and see faith, hope, and love brought out, that this is something that Paul is distinctly known for, and the very first place we could go to we heard from this morning, and I would like to piggyback on that, is 1 Corinthians 13. This love passage nestled tightly in between the chapters on God's miraculous gifting of his church for the growth of the body, for the edifying, building up of the body. so that the gospel can be declared, people can grow and be sanctified, and that everybody would know this is God's doing. 1 Corinthians 13, love. Verse 13, though, so now faith, hope, and love abide, these three, but the greatest of these is love. This is something that Paul held very practically dear to him, something in a church where it has gone awry, it is wonky, it is a church that's definitely from God. They are saints, he writes, too, in chapter one. They are called to be saints, they are Christ's, but there's a lot of correction that he has to give to them. There's division in the church, there's adultery in the church, there's all sorts of practical problems. One of the biggest things that they need to learn is love, but not just love by itself, love conditioned, love couched in between faith and hope. When he's speaking to the Thessalonians, this young church, that he had to leave, though he didn't want to. 1 Thessalonians 1 verse 3, as he is mentioning them in prayer, he says, remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ. Faith produced work. Love produced labor, hope produced steadfastness. That was what was characteristic of these Christians, what is characteristic of every single Christian that cultivates these virtues, these graces. Faith, hope, and love do things. They're not just sentimental. They're not just emotional things you feel or things you think. Certainly the Colossians came to understand the grace of God in truth. They had to hear and they had to reckon with certain facts and agree with the terms of the gospel. and resign themselves to the truth of it and to the person and work of Jesus Christ. Certainly, there were those intellectual, internal workings. But faith and hope and love are things that are active and things that are present in every single genuine Christian and in a church, a church, an honest to goodness church. Later in the Thessalonian Epistle, Chapter 5, as he is giving scattershot commands and urging them on to a life of perseverance and holiness, he is speaking of those that sleep. that are spiritually not ready for the return of Christ. Those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk are drunk at night. But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love and for a helm at the hope of salvation. This is something, again, the armor of God that we see in Paul's passages, Ephesians 6. He goes in detail furthermore about that armor. He talks about the breastplate of righteousness. Here he calls it the breastplate of faith and love. There it was the shield of faith, nothing about love. The helmet was the helmet of salvation in Ephesians 6. Here it's the helmet of the hope of salvation. 2 Corinthians 6, he talks about the armor of righteousness in the right hand and on the left. Romans 13, he talks about the armor of light. We are soldiers. We are not playmates on a playground. A church is an army, and we are in battle. And we must be sober and take commands from our commander, our captain. But we are armed with faith, hope, and love. Lastly, in Galatians, Galatians chapter 5, verses 5 and 6. So contrary to relying on the works of the law, he says, for through the spirit, not through the flesh, not through trying to produce your salvation through your own efforts and reliance upon your own supposed goodness, your own adherence to God's words in the law, But rather, through the Spirit, by faith, we ourselves eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness. So we are justified by faith in Jesus Christ now. He contends for that again and again in the book of Galatians. But there is a future day for which we hope, we confidently expect, that God will declare us to be in the right. to be having his own righteousness faultless before his throne, so that men and angels will see these are children of God. They are loved by God. A hope of righteousness, that's hope, for in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love. We have hope, faith, and love, this triad of sanctification that Paul uses again and again. That's real Christianity, as opposed to Judaism. Going back to the shadows, trying to justify yourself by the law, is not the way to earn God's favor. That will not cultivate these virtues of faith, hope, and love. It is walking contrary even to Abraham's example. Abraham believed God and it was counted to him for righteousness. Those Judaizers who were coming to their assemblies and saying that you must be circumcised also, you must keep the law also, you must adhere to the traditions of the Pharisees and keep hand washing and clean and unclean laws. could not muster up what is natural to a Christian. A cult can't cultivate faith, hope, and love. It is something that God does inside of us, and this is why it is called love in the spirit. It is something that God works in us and has his fingerprints all over it. So that faith in Christ Jesus and that love, notice for all the saints, for all those that were in their congregation, for all those that they were neighbors with, near neighbors with, those in Ephesus, those in Hierapolis, those in Laodicea, Those that they had heard of, that Paul's also planting churches in far off places. We've heard tell of a church in Antioch, there's the church in Jerusalem, there's the churches in Asia and Cappadocia and Bithynia, and all of those kinds of provinces, God is doing a work. Now it is easy for us to love all the saints that we have never seen before, that we have only heard of churches planted off in Timbuktu. I love those people because they are part of the body of Christ, and I'm a part of the body of Christ. But love for all the saints in their own church, in their own assembly, this is the hand of God. We are brothers and sisters, we share meals together, we share time together, we share service together. Is there that kind of love for one another that smacks of God's love among us for all the saints? Well, this brings me to my second point, is the hope that's found in the gospel. He says, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven, or in the heavens. Which means that the faith and love that they have is something that stems from the hope that they have in the gospel. They heard from Epaphras this glad tiding, this good news, that there is a Savior come from heaven. when they could not ascend to heaven by themselves, by magic, by rites, by works. It doesn't matter what they had tried, it would all be in vain. God did. Jesus came down and did for us all of the good works necessary for us to even entertain the hope of entering heaven. If and if it was only that Jesus took away our sin so that we sat at a neutral place, we would, as one said, have no more right to enter heaven than a post, a fence post. We need the righteousness, the good works of Jesus Christ that he lived out his whole life counted to us. But this is the good news. You have nothing which you can boast of. Though people tried to pat themselves on the back, though these Colossians formerly had trusted in things that were not God, had trusted in themselves, they heard from Epaphras. My friend, that is going to drag you to hell. There is only one Savior God has sent, the true and living God, not a God of stone and wood, not a God of even gold and silver, but the one who made the whole cosmos, the one who made us in his image, who from one man made every nation. He sent his son and his son is unique. And His Son is the only Savior. His Son is the one who lived the life you should have lived. And He died the death you should have died. And He rose again victorious and He has conquered all of these demons that you worship. And you need to repent now and trust in Him. And my friend, He promises He will save you from every single one of your sins. Not a dot, not an iota of your sin will be left for you to face God's wrath on that last day. They had heard that and they had responded. God graciously granted them that heart of faith that they had taken Christ and they had taken Epaphras at his word. They had staked their souls on what Jesus had done And it bore fruit in their life. Look at this. From the day that they heard it and understood the grace of God and truth, they started bearing fruit. They had a hope. No longer was it them just trying to do a little of this and a little of that. What will work? What was I brought up with? What have I been raised to understand of the world? But now this is real. genuine hope. This is something that will outlive me. This is something that is based in the truth of the gospel. Hope produces love and faith. Hope produces action. If you don't have hope, if you have lost sight, of the hope, the confident expectation that you will be received into glory by a God that has no frown for you because all of your sin was wiped away in Christ's blood. By a God that calls himself your father and you are his child. You're accepted and there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. If that is your confident expectation that God has said this and I cannot, then he cannot lie, then you will have that kind of optimism. God will do what he says. God will take care of me. My body will die. But my spirit will go to be with the Lord. And there is no going back on this. I've already passed the point of no return, and the Lord will keep me. He will not cast me out. There is an eternal security, and it's laid up, he says, in heaven for me. God's reserved my spot there. That is something that will give the believer a sigh of relief, that will give you hope. Now, whenever you are In a counseling situation, as we often should be with one another, as the Romans were with one another in their assembly, able to admonish one another, hope in the gospel is what is needed. Not only, of course, is the basic problem man's sin, but The way to overcome that sin is the hope that we have in the gospel. And a counselor, one like Epaphras, would point his congregants to that hope. J. Adams, the founder of biblical counseling, though, I mean, he was digging up what already had been said and done in past generations, says the counselor must love people. That is the one reason why he counsels. Because he does, he will be deeply distressed whenever he discovers that a counselee has lost hope. But even that distress must be balanced by enthusiastic hope. It is his task always to sound the note of biblical optimism that is warranted by the promises of God. A counselor must be above all, sorry, above much else a man of hope. Brothers and sisters, we do have hope in the gospel. We have hope that is future. We have hope that if we were to die presently, that we would be absent from the body and at home with the Lord. He would receive us graciously. We would enter His presence with joy. We would bow before Him. There would be fear and awe, but it would be overwhelmed by His love. We have that hope. But also, more than just a future thing, we have hope even to overcome sin. We have a hope laid up for us in heaven, but we have a hope that there's victory, that we can actually enter heaven. We have a hope that God is doing a work in us even now, and is able to conquer through us those destructive sin habits. You need not lose hope that you will never get over this sin. Without holiness, no one will see the Lord. But brothers and sisters, if you have received the gospel, then you do have that hope. And you then do have the ability to work out that holiness that he's already implanted and begun in you. And S, a sense in which we should be optimistic Christians because of the hope that we have in heaven. Now, this kind of optimism, it comes out in Paul's next statements about the fruitfulness of the gospel. So he says that they had received the gospel. They heard before in the word of the truth the gospel. which has come to you, and then he relates the work that's done there in Colossae to the work that's going on around the world, as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and increasing, as it does also among you since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth. There is a fruitfulness to the cross and resurrection and the preaching of the gospel. Paul would have believed that it is possible for churches to be planted and for, though there is assault from Satan, that this church can stand firm and they can be full of love and hope and faith. He can believe that because there's a greater work that God is doing. He links what God has been doing in Colossae to what God is doing elsewhere in the rest of the world. This kind of fruitfulness, this fructification of the gospel, that wherever Paul goes, churches are planted. Yes, there's opposition. Yes, there's Jewish envy. Yes, there's persecution. Yes, he has to spend time in prison. He's doing that right now. But that doesn't stop God. That does not stop the Lord Jesus as the head of the church from using his body members to reach out to the ends of the earth. God has started something that he is not going to stop. Think of the Lord Jesus when he said to his apostles, or he says, you did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should remain. There is something in the work of the gospel, the proclamation of the gospel, that has the power of God behind it to actually persuade sinners and enable them to trust Christ, to come out of darkness and into his marvelous light, and to actually gather together on a regular basis to the chagrin of the devil who formerly had them captive. That though there are pagans around them trying to persuade them to worship angels and they need to get circumcised, keep these food laws, God is doing a work and it's fruitful. You and I don't always see that fruitfulness. In fact, I think you and I often doubt that fruitfulness. Here is a brother who's much more experienced than you and I, and the conditions that he was in I don't think differ that much. There's not that great of a degree of difference between what Paul was doing and what we should be doing and are doing here. Even when we count the miraculous gifts waning, they were still being used, but then waning towards the end of Paul's ministry, we still have the preaching of the gospel. We have the same Holy Spirit. We have the same God and Father to go and with holy violence, mount the walls of heaven and take heaven by storm. We are able, by God's grace, to see the same kind of fruitfulness. We have a hope in heaven. And if God has done the greater thing, and he's made sinners acceptable in God's sight, acceptable in the beloved, he's able to do the easier thing of making saints more holy and loving. If he's able to give life where formerly there was death, He's able to make that organism grow and reach farther and farther and farther across the lands. Well, this is something that Christ has done as a result of his death and resurrection. And it is the language that he uses to describe this about the whole world bearing fruit and increasing because of the gospel. Much like when it says that Jesus has, through his cross, reconciled all things to himself, some have taken these verses and have seen just how great and far-reaching, how abundant the language is that Paul uses and have have said that, well, because of these verses, we think that Christ will eventually save everybody, that his work is so effective that everybody that has died now, and even though they were an unbeliever, God is going to reclaim them and they're going to be saved, which is false. Others have said this language is so strong about the fruitfulness of the gospel, that everywhere it's bearing fruit and increasing, that the Great Commission was fulfilled in the first century. And there is no more Great Commission to do. They had the Great Commission from Jesus, and beside that they had a checkbox, and they checked it. Great commission done. Such is the belief of those that would be hyper-preterists. Not only the great commission has been fulfilled, but also the resurrection has been fulfilled, and all that's left throughout all of eternity is the church age, and yes, death is still here. That's because they would say what was promised to us is a spiritual resurrection, not a physical resurrection. But Paul looks forward to a physical resurrection. Paul knows that there's going to be a future day of judgment, that it wasn't something that had already happened, and there's more to do. There's more labor to be done. Epaphras has only begun his work. Those churches still are in a battle, hence why he writes this letter. The letter needs to be written because despite the fruitfulness, there are foxes that threaten the fruitfulness of these tender vines. There is a wild boar in the forest and Paul aims his spear to go and javelin that boar and roast it for lunch. There is something to be said where these Christians, great as they are, firm as they are, they need to be strengthened and equipped. Fruitfulness, yes. God is doing something. Praise Him. But you have to be on guard. You've not yet arrived. There's love in the Spirit. Faith, hope, and love is there. But you're not glorified. you have still holiness to grow in. So, we will come to that prayer that he prays for them, that they would be engaged in this battle and have the equipment that they need. But he finishes this section off by saying that they had understood, they had heard, they had believed this gospel that came through Epaphras. He calls him our beloved sundoulos. our fellow slave. And the slave is different than the servant. A different word is used, a faithful minister, diakonos, of Christ, a faithful servant of Christ. But he's a fellow slave. God is the master and he is a slave owner. We are his creatures, but he's a good master. And he has purchased people with his blood, and there are those among his possessions that go out and they preach the gospel and communicate the gospel. He can tell by the work that's been done, by the faith, hope, and love in this assembly, that Paul, sorry, not that Paul, that Epaphras was faithful. He discharged his task. faithfully because there's fruit. Who cares if you've got a thousand churches that pop up and you've got a 10,000 hands that are raised if by next week there is no growth in grace, faith, hope, love. Love in the Spirit, the things that actually very truly evidence themselves to be a work of God. If you've got all the bells and whistles, and you've got all of the giant mega church stuff, but there isn't what actually makes a Christian a Christian, who cares? God doesn't even care. Without love, you're nothing to God. Faith, hope, and love. I'm going to close this by referencing something that Rosalind Goforth, missionary to China, has said in her book, Climbing. And she had the opportunity and passed this opportunity to love somebody when they needed it. And she wrote down, as she often does in her autobiographies, the mistakes that she made. She's very candid about this. She says, one day it was quite rough. As I was descending the winding staircase, holding on to the banister, I met this dear mother ascending to the deck above. She's on a ship, obviously. One arm held the baby. The other, with difficulty, held hold of the older child while steadying herself against the rail. How my heart went out to her in pity. I said to myself, that cruel husband, to leave her alone with these little children. But I did not stretch out a hand to help. The mother was too intent on trying to save herself from falling, even to notice my look of pity. In years to come, when traveling with my own little ones, how often, when others have helped me while I was in as much need as was she, has the remembrance of my thoughtlessness come vividly to mind. Why did I not help? Perhaps just because I didn't think. But it was a lost opportunity, for we reached port soon after, and I never saw her again. She closes with this, I shall pass through this world but once. Any good, therefore, that I can do or any kindness I can show to any human being, let me do it now for I shall not pass this way again. Let us pray and ask the Lord to work these graces in us. Lord God and Father, we are confident that you do produce the effects of the gospel. But Lord even among us that are here that have understood the grace of God in truth we have tasted and seen that Lord you are good yet when we see the faith that you have gifted to us and the love that has been shed abroad in our hearts and the hope that we do have, Lord how often these things are wavering. Often these things are shaky and cold, and we pray, Lord God, that you would stir us up. Lord, that these graces would grow and be strengthened. We pray that you would please do this work in us, that your work would be seen, that the fruitfulness of the gospel would be evident. And from here out into the darkness beyond, that you would save those in this neighborhood, in this city, Lord, that we would be able to rejoice in your work that we see going on across the globe. Lord, please draw sinners to yourself, Lord, that of these children and of any here that are adults still graceless, I pray that they would come to trust in the Lord Jesus who alone can save them. and have that hope laid up for them in heaven too. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.