Living Faithfully in a Misaligned World

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We’re going to start a series on Colossians, a letter written to the Colossian church many years ago.

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother, to God’s holy people in Colossae, the faithful brothers and sisters in Christ. Grace and peace to you from God our Father.

We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love you have for all God’s people—the faith and love that sprang from the hope stored up for you in heaven, and about which you have already heard in the true message of the gospel that has come to you.

In the same way, the gospel is bearing fruit and growing throughout the whole world—that’s encouraging—just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and truly understood God’s grace. You learned it from Epaphras—that’s a hard word to pronounce—Epaphras, your dear fellow servant, who is a faithful minister of Christ on our behalf, and who also told us of your love in the Spirit.

For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you. We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives, so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way, bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God.

Awesome. Let’s pray.

Thank you for this letter, God. I pray that what was intended for a particular people in a particular place so many years ago, in a very different place, we would hear the relevance for our life in this place, at this time, among us, your people. We pray that you would give us ears to hear, that you would give us what we pray for.

Paul prays for spiritual wisdom and understanding—that we would discern what you have for us today. Amen.

A few years ago—several years ago—when I was at this church as a youth pastor, disciple… I think I was the adult discipleship pastor, or a family pastor—I can’t remember what I was called. But in the early 2000s, I was kind of going through what I call a reconversion experience. I was just maybe understanding—beginning to understand—God, Jesus, the Christian life in a different way, in a deeper way than I had experienced it before.

I began to see that Jesus was not just my savior, but he was my Lord. And I really began to wrestle with what that actually meant—if it wasn’t just the life of a mind and an intellectual assent to faith in what Jesus had done, some kind of abstract way, but he was Lord. I had to pledge allegiance to him, and it impacted every area of my life. That makes a big difference.

And I began to really think about that. For some reason, it hadn’t captured me until that moment—that he was not just saving my soul, but he’s saving all of me, like my body. And he’s saving not just people, but he’s saving all creation. People are caught up in this cosmic renewal and restoration of all things that God is at work doing. And this begins to change everything.

It began to really awaken in me a desire to see God’s heart for people on the margins. Right? This idea of God’s justice began to kind of work itself into my way of thinking—the least, the last, the lost, the left out, the left behind. Where are these people? How is the gospel—the good news—how is it good news for them?

And so my wife gave me, for my birthday, in the midst of trying to figure all this out, a ticket to what was called the Justice Conference in Portland, Oregon. I went out there, and I was full—I was excited, I was passionate, I was pretty ignorant and very naive, okay? I didn’t know. I just knew—I thought I knew everything, but I didn’t know much at all.

So I was listening to this speaker. His name is Richard Twiss—I’m not sure if you’ve heard of him. He’s an indigenous leader. He’s a follower of Jesus and someone who has a lot to say to Christians in particular—kind of wealthier, white, middle-class Christians who come onto reservations and, you know, try to fix them.

And he had a lot to say about this. I was really challenged by him. He was a keynote speaker at this huge kind of auditorium deal, but he had a breakout session right after it. I went to this breakout session—it was standing-room only. There’s this little room with 200 people crammed in there, and I’m kind of standing at the back.

He’s talking about all the ways that Christians mess up—the missionaries mess up native communities. And it’s a little offensive. It’s hard to hear. And so I—I wanted to hear. I wanted to listen. I wanted to understand. And so I kind of raised my hand. Why? Why did I raise my hand? I raised my hand—I think he asked for questions. I hope he did. I can’t remember. I’m sure I didn’t interrupt him, but I raised my hand, and he picked me.

He selected me. And so I said—what? I said, “That all sounds great. I hear what you’re saying. But what do we do about syncretism?”

Do we know what syncretism is? What about the tendency to mix pagan practices with Christian belief, right? And what are we going to do about that?

He looked at me for what seemed like an awkward amount of time. And he said, “Who’s we, white man?”

Oh man. And everyone’s just looking at me—the white man in the back. And in front of everyone, he kind of put me in my place. I think he was just waiting for someone to ask that question, and I was the guy that did it.

He said—first, kind of made two points that I remember. They stuck with me.

First, he said, “It is up to the indigenous community to discern what is syncretism and what is not, because they are the ones that truly understand their cultural practices and what they mean. So for outsiders to come in and say, ‘Well, you can’t do that, and that, and that, and that,’ like—you need to trust the Holy Spirit at work in the community to discern these things.”

Okay.

Second, he said, “Why don’t you all figure out your own syncretism before you try to figure out ours?” Because he said, “I don’t know a more syncretistic religion than American Christianity. You’ve got your American flags, and your crosses, and your individualism, and your materialism, and the ways that the American church has completely intertwined with American culture.”

He said, “I think you have some of your own stuff to determine.”

So he said, “Yeah, let’s talk about syncretism. You figure out yours. We’ll figure out ours. And let’s follow Jesus.”

All that to say—you might have many different thoughts running through your mind. I still do. It’s still something I wrestle with. But here’s the point of that story, right?

Here’s the point: I think he’s right—that all of us have to struggle with syncretism. Every follower of Jesus, in every culture—no matter the culture—experiences pressure, consciously and subconsciously. We all tend to synthesize our cultural values with our faith. Jesus begins to look like our cultural preferences. Jesus begins to take the form and shape of our political instincts, our economic assumptions, our social norms.

Of course Jesus likes what I like, right? And prioritizes what I prioritize. It is a very natural and kind of insidious way that we begin to form our faith, because the culture that we live in is the culture we swim in, and we are so unaware of so many of the assumptions that are ingrained in our everyday life.

So when we start following Jesus—when we say, “Jesus has saved me, I want to follow him”—it’s very natural. First of all, we hear it in a culture, and we are not always aware of the assumptions. We don’t always name it.

Now, not all of this is bad. Because this is actually part of the beauty of the Christian faith—that the Christian faith can take on a lot of the culture in which it’s planted. It’s beautiful, right?

Because it’s not—if you notice, like, we’re not all wearing… you know, for instance—well, I don’t want to go into that. I don’t want to offend other religions. But—sorry, back up. I’m going off my notes here.

It’s good. Christianity redeems certain aspects of culture and allows you to worship Jesus in your own cultural expression, which is beautiful. This is why we see in Revelation—I believe it’s chapter seven, maybe chapter four—where you see every tribe, tongue, and nation giving worship to Jesus in their own language.

It’s this beautiful cacophony—this beautiful chaos—of cultural expression. I think, in their own dress, in their own language, in their own cultural expressions, using their own different kinds of music. You know, we have Native American worship music. We have French worship music. We have Chinese worship music. And it can take on all these beautiful expressions.

So Jesus redeems culture, right? And the gospel takes root in real places, among real people, with real traditions. And that’s a beautiful thing.

But also—there are aspects of every culture that are incompatible with the kingdom of God. That are incompatible with the way that Jesus calls us into and invites us to live. That challenge the culture we live in.

So we have to be willing to ask those questions. Every follower of Jesus has to ask this question: “How do I follow Jesus as a blank?”

Who are you? What are you?

How do I follow Jesus as a Colossian?

How do I follow Jesus as a Native American?

How do I follow Jesus as an African?

How do I follow Jesus as a middle-class white American woman with two kids, a dog, a cat, a part-time job, who’s in therapy and interested in video games?

I mean—how do I follow Jesus as a person in my culture, with my upbringing?

How do I follow Jesus as a teenager? As a digital native?

How do I follow Jesus? What does it look like?

It’s an important question to ask, because if we don’t ask it, we assume that we don’t have any assumptions. Right? We assume that we have no blind spots.

But there is a culture that we are formed by, and some of it is beautiful and needs to be redeemed by God. Some of it needs to be rejected.

And Jesus is inviting us into a completely new way.

So this is where the Colossians are at. This is why Paul writes to the church in Colossae—because they are a network of house churches, small, ordinary communities of believers who are doing well. Paul doesn’t have a lot of criticism for them. But they are in a culture, and they are experiencing pressures that can subtly lead them into misalignment—to kind of dress Jesus in their own cultural preferences and social norms.

So he writes to this people, in this place, in this time, centering them on Jesus.

He writes around 60–64 A.D., okay? About 30-ish years after Jesus was crucified, rose from the dead, and ascended to heaven. And so the gospel has gone out. People have begun to share it and believe it in many different cultures.

Now we have this question: what does it look like to follow Jesus as a Colossian? As a Jewish person? As a Roman?

These are the letters that Paul writes. We always have to remember—it’s important to remember—that the New Testament is largely a collection of letters written to a particular people in a particular place at a particular time. It’s not written to American church people, right? So we have to do some of this work.

But there are things we can learn from it.

They are experiencing pressure—pressure from their intellectual environment, their social environment, their cultural and economic environment—and they are tempted to live alternative stories. From these seen and unseen forces, alternative versions of what the good life is.

What does it mean to have a good life?

America has a very strong answer to that question—what the good life is, what the pursuit of happiness means.

Is it the same as the kingdom of God and the invitation of Jesus?

Maybe. Maybe not.

Let’s try to figure that out.

Alternative definitions of what it means to flourish. What it means to be successful. What it means to love. Alternative understandings of love. Alternative understandings of who God is, what God is like, and what God values and prioritizes. Ways of being human together.

How do we relate to one another? How do we relate to other genders and other ages, and rich and poor? Slave and free?

What are appropriate ways to treat one another?

There are alternative understandings, based on cultural assumptions and beliefs, that the gospel—the good news—challenges. And so Paul brings this to the Colossians.

For the Colossians, the two main forces at work that he identifies are mystical polytheism and Torah observance.

Right—the Old Testament Torah as a requirement.

Let’s start with the second one.

Christianity is a Jewish religion. We believe that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah. And so the early church considered themselves Jewish—people of the Jewish faith. They believed that the Messiah, Jesus, was the one promised in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Genesis.

They kept on being Jewish, which is great. But then there became a debate—well, as these Colossians come in, as the Romans come, as these Gentiles (these non-Jewish people), do they have to get circumcised? Do they have to obey all the aspects of the Jewish law? Some of it? All of it? None of it?

They had this tension, this question among them: what aspects of their culture and their practices can they maintain, and what do they have to keep going?

So Paul addresses that.

Then there’s mystical polytheism. Right? This is kind of external, outside the Jewish faith. There’s all this pagan religion and worship and gods—spiritual powers tied to sex and money and power.

That sounds pretty familiar to me here.

I think every culture has these gods—lowercase “g”—that vie for our allegiance and promise us all the things we desire: belonging, security, acceptance, all of this.

So these are the two major forces at work that Paul is addressing.

And what Paul does—he starts with Jesus. That’s where we need to center. He doesn’t start debating whether the sex god is the one you should really worship or anything like that. He focuses—he’s like, “We’re talking about Jesus. We’re going to center on Jesus.”

You’ve heard the illustration—if you teach a bank teller how to recognize counterfeit, you don’t show them a whole bunch of counterfeit money. You show them the real thing. And they get used to the feel and the touch and the texture and the look. It’s interacting with the real thing that allows you to discern the false—the counterfeit.

And so that’s where Paul starts: let’s look at the real thing.

Let’s look at Jesus. Let’s look at the Lord of Lords and the King of Kings.

This God. This Messiah.

He doesn’t begin with rules. He doesn’t begin with warnings. He begins with Jesus.

Jesus is our true north, right? He’s the image of the invisible God. If you want to know what God looks like, you look at Jesus. If you want to know how God interacts with people, you look at Jesus. He’s the clearest picture of God we have.

And this is what’s cool—Jesus, fully God and fully human, is the fullest, most complete picture of what it means to be a human being. He shows us what it looks like to live into our purpose as human beings—the priorities, how we relate to God as our Father, how we relate to other people, how we relate to creation.

So Jesus is—he’s why you’re here, right? Jesus. Pretty great.

Jesus is what will give us the clarity that we need.

So he starts with who Jesus is, what Jesus has done. Next week—verses 15 through 20—it’s an epic poem about Jesus that he starts off with. But this week, we’re going to look at how Paul prays, because he opens up with a prayer and thanksgiving, and we can actually tell a lot about what following Jesus looks like through what Paul prays for.

So let’s look at this.

He begins with thanksgiving, and what Paul thanks God for—what he celebrates in the Colossians—tells us something about what God loves and what God wants for them.

Verse 3 says:

“We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love you have for all of God’s people—the faith and love that springs from the hope stored up for you in heaven, and about which you have already heard in the true message of the gospel that has come to you.”

Okay, so Paul gives thanks for three things: faith, love, and hope. These things are at work in the Colossian community, and he thinks they’re beautiful. They’re evidence of the fruit of the gospel.

I think—just to kind of step out here—when you’re about to address someone and you have a concern with their life—your child, your spouse, a friend—where do you usually start?

I think it’s helpful to learn from Paul here.

Paul starts with what’s beautiful, not with what’s wrong. He starts with what God is doing in them—the evidence of God’s work in them. And I think this is a really helpful point of beginning. When you’re having hard conversations, go in with a heart of gratitude, looking for how you see God at work in this person already. Don’t go in with all the wrong stuff. Go in with, “Man, God is cultivating all of these beautiful things, and I’m really thankful for it.”

It seems to me that’s how Paul starts here.

These aren’t generic Christian virtues—faith, love, and hope. They’re markers of allegiance to Jesus.

Let’s start with allegiance. Faith.

I stress this a lot, right? You’ve heard me say this. But faith is not just an intellectual assent to an abstract truth—that we are saved by Jesus. It’s not just a switch in thinking. It is a full-body allegiance.

The word “faith,” pistis, in the Greek, was used and translated as loyalty. It’s a full-body participation in what God is inviting you into. It’s saying, “You’re going to switch how you think, and that’s going to change how you live.”

It’s not just that you believe Jesus can save you—it’s that you’re going to live like you’re saved. And that makes all the difference in the world.

So for Paul, faith really has this sense of allegiance, loyalty—a full embodied commitment.

There’s an ancient African proverb that says, “You only truly believe what lives in your muscle.”

That make sense?

You only believe that which actually activates you. If you say you believe something and it doesn’t impact how you actually live and move in the world—you don’t believe it, no matter how much you think it. If you don’t live it, you don’t believe it.

So this is what he’s talking about—this faith that leads to a life.

Here’s chapter 2, verse 6—we’ll get there later in a couple weeks—but he says:

“So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord…” That word “Lord” is important. “…continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness.”

So, as one theologian—N.T. Wright—says, he often emphasizes “Jesus is Lord.” That phrase is not a vague spiritual statement. It’s actually a political, social, and personal declaration of loyalty.

If you say “Jesus is Lord,” you’re saying he is your number one allegiance. “I pledge allegiance to Jesus.”

Right?

So that means—not to America. Not even to the marriage commitment that you’ve made. Jesus is Lord over your marriage commitment, over your vows, over any vows you’ve made—to the military, to your company, to your nation. Jesus is Lord.

And so that impacts how you prioritize your life and who you follow.

So this idea of faith that he says—“Colossians, you have faith”—you’ve transferred your allegiance from the powers of sex, money, and power. Right? Away from the gods of empire, of Caesar, and even religious priests and things like that—away from alternative stories of security and meaning—and you’ve said, “I am following and aligning myself with Jesus—Jesus alone.”

So faith is not a mental assent purely—it is a reoriented life.

That’s what Paul sees.

And then he says, “There’s love. I see love in your community.”

Notice—this is not sentimental or abstract. He says, “I see that you have love for all God’s people.”

I think in Paul’s theology, you see love as a visible fruit of allegiance to Jesus. One of the primary ways that Jesus reorients our life is into a life of love. It changes how we interact with people—how we interact with our enemies, how we interact with our spouses, how we interact with our quote-unquote inferiors, and all of that.

Faith is genuine because faith requires love that is self-giving, that is patient, that is forgiving, that is mutually submissive.

So love is costly. Love is slow. Love is concrete.

Have you guys seen Fiddler on the Roof at all? TVA?

One of my favorite scenes there is when Tevye and his wife—I can’t remember her name—but they’re asking, “Do we love each other? Do they love each other?”

They have to think about it, because it’s a culture of arranged marriage, but they’ve been together for many, many years. They have children together.

So they start singing this song, and she says, “I do the laundry, I cook the meals, I do this and this…” And he’s singing this other song, “I go out to work, I do things I don’t want to do so that I can provide…” And he begins to list all the things they do for one another.

And then he says, “I guess I love her.”

You know why? How do you know you love her?

Because you live love. You do loving things. And that’s how you know—not if you feel it, not if you’re Twitterpated right now—it’s a lived, embodied act of love.

That’s what he’s talking about.

It’s a love that crosses boundaries. It’s a love that has enabled the Colossian church to be comprised of Jews and Gentiles, rich and poor, men and women, slaves and free. And Paul gives thanks that this good news of the gospel is actually reshaping how they treat one another and who they spend time with. It’s not just around cultural lines or what benefits them—it’s based on love.

Because Jesus brings these people together.

So their love is proof that Jesus is not just being believed, but that he’s being followed.

So that’s another tangible example: faith, love, and finally, hope.

What is hope?

He gives thanks for their hope.

Hope is not optimism. It’s not Pollyanna—right? This belief that, “I believe there will be a better world.” Right?

It’s not escapism—“I’m just going to escape this world; my hope is that I get pulled from this.”

Biblical hope is a future-oriented trust that reshapes our present living. Okay?

So hope is: I believe that God is doing this thing in the world, and that ultimately, the curse will be reversed, every wrong will be made right, the world will be renewed—a new heavens and a new earth.

And it’s not just a belief in that future existence. It’s a life lived in light of that hope. It’s almost like we become people of the future, living in the present. Based on what God will do, I will orient my life now.

So hope is grounded in what God has done in Jesus and will do in Jesus—what he will complete.

It’s a declaration, again, that all of these cultural values and the things we are tempted to follow, they have promises of a good future—the gods of sex, money, and power, political candidates—they’re all offering you a hope for a preferred future. And they want you to follow it.

They’re saying, “This is your future. I will give you your future.”

So hope anchors the Colossians—and us—that Caesar, their ruler, is not the future. The powers are not the ultimate hope or future.

And this is also important: suffering—your current suffering—is not the final word. Right? This isn’t your forever reality. So it changes how we live.

All right. So let’s just summarize all this—I don’t have a slide, but you can hear me.

Paul gives thanks because their faith shows who they trust. Right? He’s thankful they trust Jesus.

Their love shows how they live. They’re living with Jesus as Lord.

And their hope shows where their lives are pointed. They live in the direction of God’s promises.

This is what’s taking root. He says, “The gospel is taking root and bearing fruit in your life.” This is good.

And then he goes into this prayer:

“For this reason,” based on your faith, love, and hope—based on the fruit here—“since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you.”

So again—we don’t start praying for people when things are going badly. We actually can pray based on what God is doing—the good things. And we’re praying for more of it.

“Praying for you, we continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives, so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way—bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God.”

So Paul is praying forward here.

Notice—he doesn’t pray that they would escape the pressure of culture. He doesn’t pray that they would avoid the suffering that the culture produces. He doesn’t pray that God would remove them from their cultural context and start a commune somewhere out in the woods, right?

He prays that they would be formed and fruitful in the midst of all this cultural pressure. Right?

That they would be formed and fruitful—like diamonds being pressed—that that would be the result of the pressure.

He says, “You’re going to need wisdom and spiritual understanding to do this—to live in a culture faithfully to Jesus, to be aware of your cultural assumptions, to not have syncretism, to see Jesus and to follow Jesus in the way that he’s called you to live in a way that bears fruit in the world.”

It requires wisdom and spiritual understanding.

So that’s what he prays for.

So let’s talk about wisdom.

You know this—but wisdom is not just information. Right?

If you’re wise, it doesn’t mean you’ll be the best Christian Trivial Pursuit champion. Right?

It doesn’t mean you know all the answers, all the facts of the Bible. You’re good at Bible trivia, okay? You can be very good at Bible trivia and very bad at living the Bible. It’s a different thing.

Wisdom is the skill of living faithfully in God’s world. Wisdom is the skill to not only love, but know how, when, and where to love. To know what love looks like. To know what love lives like.

To know—if my child… man, parenting is hard, isn’t it?

Your child is behaving in a certain way, struggling with something. And you love this child—but how exactly does this child need discipline?

Does this child need to be grounded?

Does this child need grace?

Does this child need more of an allowance?

Does this child need more freedom? Less freedom? Different friends? Same friends?

All of these questions—these are questions of love. But how do I love? What does this child need right now?

A phone? No phone? More phone?

What do we need? How do we live in this world?

This is wisdom. Spiritual discernment.

How to act. When to speak. When to resist. When to submit. When to let something go. When to call it out.

Wisdom is love in complex situations—which is life, right?

So he points out—it’s not just love-wisdom. It’s not abstract. It’s for discernment. It’s to discern what exactly is needed—what aligns with the way of Jesus and what Jesus is doing right now in this moment, with this person, in this particular situation.

So wisdom is how allegiance to Jesus—or faith—becomes daily practice. Right?

It’s one thing to say, “Jesus is Lord, and I give him full allegiance, and I’m going to live a life of love,” but how do I do that in my daily, everyday experience? With a person in my life that is beyond—like, I just don’t get it, right?

It’s marriage. It’s children. It’s coworkers. It’s the random stranger on the street.

How do I live a life of love—allegiance to Jesus?

So spiritual understanding is just another way of saying it. It’s getting more granular.

But one thing—I think the word “spiritual” gets kind of misunderstood in Paul.

“Spiritual” is not this mystical experience. You know, it’s not woo-woo. It’s not like out-there kind of feeling-feelings.

Spiritual is—here, I’ve got this written down: it refers to the work of the Holy Spirit in material reality.

So “spiritual” means—it’s like, what is the work of the Spirit in my concrete relationships? Like, as a nurse, as a parent, as a friend—what’s the spiritual thing to do?

It’s not abstract and ephemeral, but it’s concrete and embodied.

Like, what is the spiritual thing to do? What is the Kingdom thing to do? What is God inviting me—how shall I live?

So the Spirit doesn’t bypass our humanity—it heals and transforms it.

So when we ask for spiritual understanding, we’re asking: How do I live my flesh and bone—with actual money, and actual vehicles, and actual jobs, and careers, and choices?

How do I live this life that is aligned with the Kingdom of God—the priorities of Jesus?

So spiritual understanding means seeing reality as it truly is—not as how the political pundits paint it or media paints it.

But man, we need discernment. How do I see what’s actually happening? Recognizing false narratives for what they are. Discerning the voice of Jesus amid competing voices.

And it’s understanding when fear or power is discipling us more than Jesus.

That make sense?

So often, we don’t realize we’re being discipled by fear more than by Jesus—or power. This need to protect and preserve our way of life in some way. But we’re not being discipled by Christ.

So it’s about clarity. Spiritual understanding and wisdom—it’s about clarity.

How do we understand?

And notice the purpose. Paul says, “I pray that you would have wisdom and understanding so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way.”

So—almost done here—but again, this is not a prayer for moral perfection. It’s a prayer for relational faithfulness.

This is what love is all about. This is what following Jesus is all about. It’s not about being perfect—it’s about being relationally faithful. It’s about being loving.

The fruit of the Spirit—love, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control, faithfulness.

So what Paul is praying for—to sum it up—is that the Colossians would be so deeply formed by Jesus that their ordinary lives become places where heaven and earth overlap.

That’s what “spiritual” is—heaven and earth overlapping.

Jesus teaches us to pray, “Your Kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

How does that happen?

It happens through the church—the body of Christ. You and me. Exercising faith, love, and hope. Receiving wisdom and spiritual understanding as to how we participate and partner with what God is doing in the world.

Heaven and earth overlapping.

So all of this—what Colossians reminds us of as we jump in here—is it reminds us that the greatest danger to our faith is not outright rejection of Jesus.

It’s misalignment with Jesus and his way.

And that’s what’s tricky—because there’s misalignment in all of us. And there are whole swaths of Christianity that claim the name of Jesus but are misaligned.

And I won’t even assign, you know, malintent there. I think often people are very sincere, but they’re not aware of the cultural biases that are leading them into a certain cultural understanding of who Jesus is, what the Kingdom of God is like, and what he’s asking of us.

All of us have that. We can be very sincere, loving people who have been miscalibrated—misaligned with Jesus, with what the Kingdom means, what faith means, what love looks like, and how we live.

So we are desperate for wisdom and spiritual understanding.

We’re desperate for Jesus, and we’re desperate to know what Jesus looks like and what he invites us into.

And I think that’s what Colossians helps us out with.

So just on this little beginning—where he begins with prayer and thanksgiving—I think that’s a beautiful place to start.

As we begin to ask ourselves: Where is my life—my thinking—misaligned? Where have I begun to dress Jesus in cultural values, personal values, that he is asking me to take off?

We start with giving thanks—for where we do see faith, hope, and love in our life. Where we do see allegiance to Jesus.

We then ask for wisdom and discernment—that God would show us where we’re misaligned.

Asking for wisdom—how we live faithfully within our culture without being captive to it.

So this is a great place to start praying.

So, Colossians—they have a few problems, right? Ancient problems and pressures. I think these are human problems.

We all struggle, and our culture still offers us this mystical polytheism, right? The gods of sex, money, power—we’re tempted and lured. They at least show up in different ways in our culture. You just watch TV for a minute—some commercials—and it’ll tell you.

We have struggles with legalism and things like that. But there are probably some particularly American or modern challenges: consumerism, materialism, individualism.

Individualism—I mean, that shapes so much of who we are as Americans. But those aren’t the assumptions of Scripture. You know, whenever it says “you” in Colossians, it’s a plural. It’s a “y’all,” all right?

So most of these invitations are to a community—not to you as an individual.

Now, your faith is deeply personal. It’s personal, but not individual. So God can deal with each of us personally, deeply, but it’s always in the context of community and relationship to others.

Does that make sense? The difference? The distinction?

Individualism says, “I’m my own island, and it’s just me and Jesus.” As long as I’m doing this thing, it doesn’t matter how it works.

But Christianity is a team sport. It’s a team sport. We all have roles to play, and it impacts others.

So—individualism, militarism—even the emphasis and maybe sometimes the idolatry of the nuclear family. That’s a particular Western value. Again, not saying it’s all bad. There are some beautiful things. But maybe we would ask some questions about it.

These kinds of pressures tend to work subtly, imperceptibly—kind of like that proverbial frog in the pot of water as it gets heated up. You don’t feel it until you’re boiling.

So some of us—maybe we’re at a boiling point in our faith.

And here’s the good news. And we’ll end here.

I’ll borrow this from the Bible Project summary of Colossians. It’s kind of the working overall thesis of Colossians we’ll work with here:

Paul tells the Colossian church—and he tells us—that no part of human existence is untouched by the loving and liberating rule of Jesus.

No part of your life—from the bedroom to the bathroom to the workplace—no part of your life is untouched by the liberating, loving rule of Jesus.

And here’s the invitation:

If that’s true, here’s the invitation—you are invited to live now as if the new creation has truly arrived when Jesus rose from the dead.

That’s the invitation.

When—TJ, come up and we’ll prepare for communion.

I think it’s interesting—in one of the resurrection narratives, I believe it’s in John—the first post-resurrection appearance after Jesus is raised from the dead, Mary Magdalene finds him in the garden and mistakes him for the gardener.

And he’s also risen from the dead on Sunday—the seventh day. Not the Sabbath, not the Jewish Sabbath—the sixth day—but the first day of the week. The day of new beginning.

So a lot of scholars make this connection—that this promise of new creation has begun with the resurrection of Jesus.

Jesus unleashes the new creation.

And we see—as he’s raised from the dead—he is mistaken for a gardener. And that’s exactly what God is—he’s a gardener.

There’s a Garden of Eden. There’s a new garden.

A Garden of Eden destroyed by sin and death and going the wrong way—buying the serpent’s lie.

And now we have a resurrected Lord and King reestablishing, making new this garden that was spoiled by sin.

There’s a new garden—a new Eden.

And this is new creation.

So we’re invited to live in the already—not yet. The already-arrival of the new creation, the new garden, the renewed world that God is bringing about—the new heavens and the new earth.

And there’s still the struggle and pain—the tooth and claw, the deceit, the lies, the sin of the old garden. But it’s merging—heaven and earth overlapping.

And Jesus is ultimately bringing about this new world.

Jesus is Lord of everything.

And that’s very good news.