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I want to read again our text
for today without the italicized words. Walk in wisdom toward
those outside, redeeming the time, your speech always with
grace, seasoned with salt, that you may know how you ought to
answer each one. For the last several months,
I want to say to you visitors, we've been working our way through
this great letter of Paul to the Colossians. And we've seen
how his great concern was to present the antithesis to the
false teaching that was threatening this congregation. One of the things that these
false teachers wanted to do was to bring them back again to a
ceremonial kind of worship that really meant a reversion to an
Old Testament standpoint. Another thing was their mystical
speculation about angels and things of that kind. But in a
way, the most devastating error that these teachers brought into
the church was a tendency toward an ascetic view of holiness,
where you go out of the world and you devote yourself to the
cultivation of your own inward piety. When Jesus Christ said,
we're to go into the world, not out of it, not to be of it, but
we are to go into the world for him. This great error later on
became very harmful in the ancient church. Indeed, it became so
dominant that even great men like Augustine were led away
with it. But nevertheless, we see quite
clearly in this epistle that the apostles' answer to this
false teaching was to go into the world and to all of the institutions
that God himself had created to redeem them for the honor
and glory of his name. That's why he begins with husbands
and wives. Marriage is a divine institution. We're not supposed to flee away
from it. We're supposed to rejoice in it and to see it redeemed
by the glorious power of God that it might be like the marriage
of Christ and his church. And then he deals with the subject
of children and their parents because God doesn't want us to
flee away from the institution of the human family. That's a
divine creation. He doesn't want us to disparage
it or to think that holiness comes in fleeing from it, but
he wants us to redeem it to his glory and honor. And then he
turns to work and talks about slaves and masters. And that
also is something that God calls his people to do, to redeem the
work in which they are doing by becoming servants of the living
God in doing it, so that they're serving God while they're serving
their human master, and they have an eye singled to his glory. And then, as you know, he goes
on to talk about prayer, which is also another way in which
we are in this world. to perfect holiness in the fear
of God, and now finally, in the fifth place, he comes to this
matter of Christian witness. And he says to these Colossian
people, over against the error of these false teachers, people,
you are to walk in wisdom toward those outside, redeeming the
time Your speech always with grace, seasoned with salt, that
you may know how you ought to answer each one. You know, my trip last year to
the continent of Africa finally taught me why the Bible speaks
about walking the way it does. We are a riding civilization
here. We get in the car and go where
we want to go. It's even reached the place that
you go to the golf course and you get a cart and ride around
in it. We are a riding culture. Not a walking culture, a riding
culture. Even Doris and I ride our bicycles
rather than walk. Maybe we ought to start walking.
But anyway, One of the things I learned by my visit to Africa
last year was that that's not the way it is in some parts of
the world. Especially in Malawi, I was just
amazed at the constant sight of people walking. Walking everywhere,
walking in the cities, walking in the countries, walking along
the highways. Sometimes ladies walking along
the highways with enormous sacks of grain balanced on their heads. Their whole way of life is characterized
by walking, and that is why walking in the Bible became a kind of
shorthand term for the whole of life. When the Bible says,
walk, in wisdom it means that's the way your lifestyle is supposed
to be characterized. Whatever you're doing, wherever
you're walking, wherever you're going, you are to be doing it
in wisdom. And of course, wisdom is something
that we need to always remember is more than mere knowledge.
You can have a lot of knowledge and the result is no more than
to puff you up with the idea that you know a lot. But in the
Bible, wisdom is not the same as knowledge. That is why people
of very limited intellectual ability may have a lot of wisdom,
And people of great intellectual ability may not have any wisdom
at all. Wisdom is not only the knowledge
of the truth of God rightly apprehended, understood, grasped, and made
a part of oneself, but also, in addition to that, the knowing
how to use that knowledge to the glory of God. You don't have
wisdom unless you have the knowledge, plus the knowledge of how to
use that knowledge, as we've seen constantly in our adult
Sunday school class in our study of the Book of Proverbs. The
writer of the Book of Proverbs was a man who had a lot of knowledge,
but he also knew how to use that in the daily practice of life. And that is what he is talking
about here. You people are supposed to walk,
he might even have said ride, in wisdom. Whatever you're doing
in your lifestyle today, just as in ancient times, you are
to be doing it in the sphere of wisdom. Everything is to be
characterized by a real grasp of the truth of God and of how
the truth of God applies in every situation. Here then is the fountainhead
of effectual witnessing for Jesus Christ. You can't witness for
Christ unless you have wisdom. You might try it in a mechanical
way. I remember I had a professor
in college years ago who said he was in Grand Rapids one time
and a man accosted him outside of a rescue mission. And he said
to him, are you saved, brother? And he said, yes, I am. Now what
shall I do? And the man said, wait a minute,
I'll run inside and find out what I'm supposed to tell you.
He didn't know what to say. You see, you can have a mechanistic
approach to witnessing without any wisdom. But to have wisdom
is essential if we are to be effectual witnesses for Jesus
Christ, because only when we have wisdom can we redeem the
time. Now that phrase is very interesting
because redeem means to buy back or purchase out of one domain
into another. And in this case it means we
are to buy the time, this precious opportune moment, that's what
kairos means in the Bible, we are to buy it back out of the
dominion and power of the devil into the dominion and power of
Christ. And in order to buy it back,
to redeem it, we have to have wisdom as over against the lack
of wisdom, in fact, the great shroud of darkness that now colors
our whole culture and civilization. I'll give you just one example.
Our entire culture is absolutely permeated today by the satanic
lie called evolution. It's taught right over here at
the school all day long. It comes through your television
set every single day. If you subscribe to the National
Geographic magazine, it is full of it from one end to the other.
The whole culture in which we live is dominated by a lie that
does not differ at all in principle from the false religion of the
ancient Egyptians. Did you ever look at some of
those strange-looking gods that the Egyptians worshipped? Do
you know what they were? They were deifications of the
powers of nature. That's what they were. The Egyptians
attributed to natural forces with the dim understanding they
had of those natural forces, a divine power and glory. And that's exactly what modern
civilization has done in the doctrine, the dogma, the lie
of evolution. It has ascribed to this blind,
accidental process called evolution what really belongs to the one
living and true God. We haven't advanced one degree
beyond the superstition of the ancient idolaters in the land
of Egypt, who changed the glory of God into the likeness of things
that man could make, and deified the powers of nature just as
we ourselves have in the doctrine of evolution. Now what our text
is telling us is, and this is just one aspect, I won't go into
others, that we are to buy back the time, this opportune moment
that comes to us, we are to buy it back out of that dark dominion
of Satan, which holds so many people captive by false ideology
in every way, and we are to buy it over for the kingdom of our
Lord Jesus Christ. The opportune moment that comes
to you and comes to me, it comes to every one of us as Christian
believers. Just like it came to Jesus that
day in Samaria when He met that Samaritan woman. That was an
opportune time that Christ redeemed. And He redeemed it because He
had wisdom. And He could see the great gulf
between that woman as she was and that woman as he would have
liked to see her. And that characterized Jesus'
ministry on earth all the time. Think of Nicodemus. Christ had
the wisdom to see the great gulf between where Nicodemus was and
where he ought to be. And Zacchaeus, Christ saw the
great gulf between where he was and where he ought to be. You
have to have wisdom to discern that right here in Carson. And you have to have wisdom to
be able to buy the opportune moment for Jesus Christ by witnessing. And that brings us to the method
of witnessing. How do you witness, then, at
that opportune time, buying it back for Jesus? Well, friends,
you do it with speech that has grace as its universe
of existence and is seasoned with salt. You and I as Christians are supposed
to live and move and have our being in the universe of grace. Do you understand grace? as it's
revealed in the Bible? I hope you do. You don't understand
grace as it's revealed in the Bible unless you say, to start
with, I am a hell-deserving sinner. If God had cast me into the flames
of hell forever, he would have been just and righteous altogether. But, from all eternity, For reasons that surpass my ability
to explain, understand, or analyze, He chose me in Christ that I
might be holy and without blame before Him in love. I was predestined
for the adoption as a son. Now that's grace. Didn't deserve
it, didn't do anything to get it. God did it. And then in the
fullness of time, being a dead sinner by nature, as all men
are, and dead means absolutely helpless and unable to do anything
to save yourself, the sovereign God, by the mighty power of His
Spirit, and I'm using biblical terms, quickened me, and that
means made me alive from being dead, and raised me up together
with Christ to sit in heavenly places. Regeneration, we call
this in Christian dogmatics. By the regenerating power of
the Holy Spirit, I, who once was dead, am now alive. I, once
being blind, can now see. I, once being deaf, can now hear,
and therefore respond to the glorious gospel invitation. And
then what did God do after I did respond? Because He enabled me
to respond, well, He justified me, and that's by grace too.
He counted me as righteous altogether because of the atonement of his
son Jesus as my substitute. He counted me righteous and counted
Christ to be damn worthy for which he suffered on the cross
of Calvary. And having justified me, he adopted
me into his family. And having begun a good work
in me, the Bible says he's going on with that work and he's going
to keep on going on with that work until the day of Christ. And that means that from start
to finish, the whole thing is by God's unmerited, unsolicited
favor. That's grace. And it is in that
universe that the Christian lives and moves and has his being.
He's always conscious that it's all of grace and not of works
at any point to any degree. As Spurgeon once said, if I sew
one stitch in my celestial garment, the Lord God will say, get out
of here, you do not belong in my kingdom. One stitch. It's
all of grace. For by grace are you saved through
faith, and that not of yourself, it is the gift of God. Even your
faith is the gift of God, and not of works, lest any man should
boast." Now, if you've got wisdom, you're living in the sphere of
grace, and then he says your speech should not only reflect
that grace, but should be seasoned with salt. Have you ever been
anywhere where there was no salt at all? I'll tell you one thing,
it's hard to even eat the food if there isn't any salt. I mean,
for cooking or anything else. Just try it sometime. You'll
say, eh, and you'll probably spit it out because it's so unpleasant
to eat. Salt is that which brings a sharpness
to the flavor. It's a preservative in the Bible,
It is something that is therefore quite often used symbolically
in the scriptures, and here it is used for the fact that the
Christian, therefore, in his encounter with the world, has
a certain sharpness. And you can see that in the encounter
of Jesus with this woman at the well. Woman, you don't know what
you worship. Try that sometime on some of
your friends in Carson. You'll just see what salty means. I've lived most of my life, congregation,
in cities, and I've come to the conclusion that it is harder
to be a consistent Christian in Carson than in New York City. Fundamentally, that's the truth.
Do you know why? Because the pressures for conformity
are greater here than they are there. The pressures for conformity
are enormously amplified in a small rural community where everybody
knows everybody and everybody belongs to some church. But I tell you the mindset of
the community of Carson is not any less worldly and dark than
it is in New York City. Do you know that? That's a fact.
Let me give you just a few reflections that I myself have come to know
right here in Carson. It doesn't matter what your denomination
is. or the way that you worship.
You can be a good Christian even if you sit under a lady preacher
every Sunday. Just as good as anybody else. Truth doesn't matter that much.
Doctrine isn't all that important. What counts is that we are all
good people. I can't think of more horrendous
heresies than I've just stated. Those are right out of the pit
of hell and widely believed and accepted right here in this community. That is why the one thing that
is utterly verboten in Carson is to criticize any other denomination. or to criticize what people do
on the Lord's Day. For at all costs, and here's
where the pressure is so great, we must maintain an atmosphere
of unity and peace between denominations, even if they really hold to different
religions under the label of Christian. And that's the fact,
folks. That is what really If you've
got wisdom, you see it. If you don't, you don't. All of these commonly held principles,
so popular in rural North Dakota, are utterly condemned in the
Bible. And our speech is not seasoned
with salt if we just meekly go along with it. And so often we
do. I want to give you an illustration
right out of our own churches. past eight years. We had a funeral
service some years ago in the old building, and after the committal
we came back to the church building for dinner. And I happened to
sit there with a woman from another denomination, and she began to
talk about the awful decline in America. Well, I was really
interested when I heard that. She was talking about the terrible
moral decline of our nation. Do you know what she blamed it
on? Immigrant people coming into America from Southeast Asia and
the like. They're different from us, she
said. That's ruining the nation. I'd say that's pretty standard
North Dakota thinking. And I could have just sat there
in silence and let it go by, but this time I bought some time
back for Jesus. So I said to her as pleasantly
as I could, no, that's a wrong diagnosis. What's really wrong in America
is what's been happening in some of the churches that have congregations
right here in Carson, where they now have lesbians approved by
the highest officials of the church. Homosexuals allowed to
be in the ministry. Women allowed to preach when
God says they can't. Denials of the great truth of
the Bible, and people here paying the salaries of those people
who are denying it. It is the fact that the mainline
churches of America have abandoned biblical standards, that's what's
wrecked our nation. Well, I suppose you would guess
she didn't like what I said too well. But at least I was attempting
to buy the time back for Jesus. To speak because God gave me
the wisdom to see what really is wrong. To speak it, I hope,
with salt. But you and I both know that
the trouble so often is that we remain silent. If we didn't remain silent, there
would be more sparks flying than there are. You see, congregation, the world
and life view of the unregenerate man doesn't differ from our world
and life view only on peripheral matters or only on one or two
things. The world and life view of a
biblical Christian differs at every point from that of outsiders from the kingdom
of God. And what we need to do is to
learn to understand the wisdom of God, the scriptures, the truth
of God, the system of God's revelation, and how to use it so that we
can present the antithesis we can present the speech that is
full of grace and seasoned with salt. Our text says we need to
know how we ought to answer each one. Well, how did Christ answer
the woman at the well? That was just a different denomination,
you know. That's what they said. They're
just a different denomination of Jews. That's what the Samaritans
said. We believe the books of Moses. We believe the Messiah
is coming. But what the Samaritans said
were just a different denomination. Jesus said, you people don't
even know who you worship. I say the same thing of the liberals
in the churches of America today. They don't know who they worship. It certainly isn't the God I
worship. Jesus had to tell Nicodemus,
the Pharisee, you shouldn't be a teacher in Israel. You don't
even understand the necessity of the new birth. Well, friends,
wake up. The situation is the same in
Carson. Really it is. Lots of religious
people here do not have a clue, to use a New Zealand expression,
A lot of people here think that people are basically good, and
that is the absolute antithesis of the biblical teaching that
God looked down from heaven and couldn't even find one man that
is good. Psalm 14, Psalm 53, Romans chapter
3. And their delusions are not going
to be dispelled unless we do for them what Jesus did for Nicodemus. You see why the monastic solution
is so attractive? It's a lot easier, folks. It's
a lot easier to go into a cell and read and pray than it is
to be faithful at the senior meals over here. That's hard. To speak the truth of God in
love and with salt over at the senior meals, that's a tough
one. That's a tough assignment. Going into a cave like the hermits
in the ancient church, that's easy. And God doesn't want us
to do the easy thing. He wants us to build Christian
marriages, Christian families, Christian workplaces. He wants
us to be people of prayer, and He wants us to be people who
witness toward those outside. So I want to ask you today, are
you doing it? Or are you just going along and
failing to redeem the opportune moment? Now come on, every one
of you, you have opportune moments and you're supposed to redeem
it for Christ. Don't you know it's a costly
thing to be a disciple of Jesus? Well, take up your cross and
follow Him. Sure, it's easier to be quiet and by silence to
give consent to the most horrible denials of the Bible. You're
tempted every day to do it, but you're not to do it. No, sir. You are to walk in wisdom, your
speech always with grace, seasoned with salt, that you may know
how you ought to answer everyone. Well, I know that You're like
me, sometimes you fail, and I hope sometimes you don't. May God
give you the grace more and more to seize that golden moment of
opportunity and bear faithful witness for Jesus. Amen. We thank you this day, O God,
for this wonderful exhortation of the Apostle. Every one of
us here, we have to confess, we have failed many times. The
moment was there, the opportunity in front of us. We were cowards. We didn't say anything. We didn't
redeem the time. But oh how we rejoice in those
times that, however imperfectly, yet we did. Redeem it for Jesus. Help us more and more to do this.
To the honor and glory and praise of His name. For we ask it in
Jesus' name, Amen.
Colossians #30 - Church Life in the Apostolic Age
Series Colossians - GIW
Delivered at Bethel Orthodox Presbyterian Church - Carson, ND - Col4114b
| Sermon ID | 103009037290 |
| Duration | 30:31 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday - AM |
| Bible Text | Colossians 4:7-18 |
| Language | English |
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