July 18 2021
Colossians 1:3-27
I love this time of year especially when I see the pictures of all the kids headed off to enjoy a week at church camp. You see, I was once one of those kids. Growing up I was a United Methodist so the church camp I went to was Camp Wanake. I remember that I started going to church camp at the age of eight, which would have been in nineteen sixty nine, the same year as the moon landing. I am sure that I learned a lot about Jesus that first year but what really is stuck in my mind is that the bathroom facilities were outhouses and I was quite terrified of going into that stinky little shed overrun by spiders and so the result was a very bad stomach ache which helped me overcome my fear. Despite this rocky start though I continued to go back every year to Camp Wanake for the next five years. I remember drinking lots of bug juice, roasting many hotdogs and marshmallows over the fire and around that same fire our Camp Counselors would tell us stories about a man named Jesus, about how he came and lived just like us and how he loved us and how he died just for us. I remember also the little red paperback gospel of Luke which became quite dog eared which I still have. So, when I look back on my life, its quite obvious that even though I may have not realized it at the time, going off to church camp was pretty important in my ending up spiritually where I did.
You too might have similar stories, maybe not about church camp perhaps your story involved a Sunday School teacher or a friend or a pastor or a youth group leader who just took the time to listen but I hope you had some experience of God’s love in your past that had an affect on where you are in your walk with Jesus today. Those ways we became aware of God’s grace is what we are going to speak about today in our seventh part of our summer series called Confident. Jesus wants us to be confident, to have the utmost trust and faith in him because despite all of the afflictions of this world, Jesus remains the one who has overcome the world. The way that we strengthen our confidence in Jesus is through examining just what it is that we believe, just what it is that we hold to be true in a world with so much misinformation. For us who make up the Church of the Nazarene there are sixteen articles of faith that we can be absolutely confident about. As we have spoken in previous weeks we are people who trust confidently that our God is a triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit because this is what has been revealed to us by Jesus. Out of that primary belief in who God is comes our trust that we have a God whose nature is love. Everything we believe from that point on builds upon the fact of God’s love. It is the love of God that led Jesus, the Son of God to leave the Father’s side in heaven and take on our flesh through the Virgin birth which happened through the power of the Holy Spirit. We believe that Jesus is our Savior, the one who while we were weak and unholy, while we were yet sinners, while we were enemies of God, this Jesus our Savior died for us. Through his shed blood Jesus cleansed away our sin becoming for us the mercy seat where we could at last be reconciled to God. Through his rising from the dead, Jesus has made it possible for us to know ourselves as people who are declared to be just before God. All this brings us to what we discovered last week when we learned about our belief in what the Church calls Atonement. This is the change that has occurred because of what Jesus has done for us. Now, we have peace with God, we are forever united with him. We also because of Jesus, are now able to have access to the grace, the favor or welcome into the holy presence of God and because of Jesus we have the hope of the glory of God. This glory of God is the self-giving love of God demonstrated by Jesus upon the cross, the love which is our reason to honor and glorify him. This is the love which we are told in the fifth chapter of Romans that is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.
As you go through these articles of belief you begin to see how they all interconnect with one another. When we talked about our belief in the Holy Spirit we spoke of how the Holy Spirit, working in the lives of those who believe in Jesus, empowers those believers to be a light in a dark world. The Holy Spirit shines a light into the world about sin when he pours the love of heaven into those who believe in Christ. This we know is true because of what Jesus has accomplished through the Atonement. The same goes for how the Holy Spirit shines a light on the world concerning righteousness. The Holy Spirit does this in the lives of believers when he affects their prayer life by interceding for them. This close communion with God is what we experience when we enter into the grace of God, when we come and stand before his holy presence, an experience which we have because of what Christ has accomplished for us. The Holy Spirit we also said shines a light in the hearts of the believers concerning the judgment of the ruler of this world because it is the Holy Spirit who is the Spirit of our adoption which makes us know God as our Abba, Father. Now, when we know God as our Father we also know that we have an inheritance which is ours beyond this life. This too is what is part of our atonement, what has been accomplished for us through the death of Christ on the cross. We are told that we have the hope of the glory of God which is the anticipation of sharing in the very life of God, which is the inheritance our Father intends to give to us. I say all of this just to point out that what the Holy Spirit does is to make the Atonement that has been made possible for us through the death of Christ a reality for us to live in and live out.
As you look over these first six articles of faith then what you notice is that they are all very God focused, even the article of faith concerning sin because to understand sin one must first know the Savior, who is Jesus, the Son of God. Today we begin a new aspect of our faith because now we want to begin to understand the journey of humanity and how it is that weak, unholy, sinners, the very enemies of God become full partakers in all that God has accomplished for them. We begin with what the church calls prevenient grace, which is nothing more than the grace which comes before, the grace I experienced at church camp, the grace which you hopefully remember that influenced you. Here is what the Manual of the Church of the Nazarene has to tell us about Prevenient Grace. Article Seven: Prevenient Grace. We believe that the human race’s creation in Godlikeness included ability to choose between right and wrong, and that thus human beings were made morally responsible; that through the fall of Adam they became depraved so that they cannot now turn and prepare themselves by their own natural strength and works to faith and calling upon God. But we also believe that the grace of God through Jesus Christ is freely bestowed upon all people, enabling all who will turn from sin to righteousness, believe on Jesus Christ for pardon and cleansing from, sin and follow good works pleasing and acceptable in His sight.
We believe that all persons, though in the possession of the experience of regeneration and entire sanctification, may fall from grace and apostatize and, unless they repent of their sins, be hopelessly and eternally lost.
So, once again as we read this there is a lot to figure out, the first of which is the rather strange name for this grace, prevenient. Well, it is actually two words the first, pre, is a word that means before. The second word, venire, means to come. So, it is a word that simply means “to come before’. The reason that the founders of our denomination felt so strongly about understanding that God’s grace, his favor and welcome had to come before any human action and response is that they also firmly believed that all of us are so messed up that none of us could by our own strength come to trust in the Savior who died for us. We can not forget that, as Paul tells us, we stand in need of a Savior because we were weak, we were unholy, we were sinners and we were enemies of God. You see, sin is so deceitful, that we believe that we have something called free will which we are able to make our own choices but the reality is that our free will is nothing more than self-will, a will turned in upon itself. We hear this in our scripture for today where Paul points out to the church he is writing to that they had been people who were alienated, hostile in mind, doing evil deeds. This doesn’t sound like people who one day out of the blue could just decide that they should place their faith and trust in Jesus does it? This is the conundrum that from the very early days of the church pastors and teachers have struggled with. They knew the temptation would be that either we could just say that we are not really so bad off that we cannot choose to do good if we really wanted to, or we could say that we are so bad that God gets to choose who will be given saving faith and who doesn’t with tragic consequences for those who aren’t winners in the salvation lottery. Both of these ideas, thankfully our forefathers in the faith refused to accept and instead decided that it was God working in the lives of sinful people is what would empower them to come to saving faith.
So, we have to ask ourselves just when did this grace begin in our lives and the answer is quite surprising. Think about what Paul writes in the first few verses of the first chapter of Ephesians, where we read, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly place, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.” How can we not be amazed that God’s favor and welcome were extended to us before not only we existed but even before creation existed! The way that we were chosen is that Jesus, the Son of God had chosen to take on our flesh even before our flesh existed, and as Paul writes in his letter to the Colossians it was this body of flesh that Jesus took on, this is when his choice of us became a reality. It was there at his birth, being born a child clothed in the sinful and corrupt flesh of our humanity, this is when God’s grace invaded earth in the fullness of time. Jesus in this flesh, lived and then died upon the cross to reconcile us, to put to death our sinful nature so that at long last we might have peace with God, as we spoke about last week.
Now, the greatness of what Christ has accomplished for us is quite overwhelming and we often want to diminish this act of grace yet what has to be the logical conclusion is that the death of Jesus upon the cross is our guarantee that God has always been united with us. This is what Paul alludes to when he tells the church at Colossae that they had come to understand the grace of God, the grace that had already existed before they had come to know about it. The way Paul tells us that one becomes aware of this grace that goes before our decision for Christ is through the truth of the gospel message. We have to ask ourselves then just what is this gospel message especially knowing that we as sinful and corrupt people are rightfully unable to on our own to make a response? Here is how the gospel message was written by a man I greatly admire, pastor and theologian, Thomas Torrance. It is perhaps the best way that I have heard the gospel explained : God loves us so utterly and completely that he has given himself to us in Jesus Christ his beloved Son, and has thereby pledged himself for our salvation. In Jesus Christ God has made real his unconditional love for us in our human nature in such a once-for-all way, that he cannot go back on it without undoing the Incarnation and the Cross thereby denying himself. Jesus died for us precisely because we were sinful and unworthy of him, and has thereby already made us his own before and apart from our ever believing in him. God has bound himself to us in such a way that he will never let us go, for even if we refuse him his love for us will never cease. This is the gospel, the word of truth that we hear and when we do we begin to understand the grace of God. The word translated as ‘understood’ that Paul uses is a word that means to know through the experience of a personal relationship. So, to understand this grace then is to know that God through Jesus has made us his very own before we even are aware that he was in our lives. As we continue to figure out just what this means for us we come to realize that God has been with us through every experience we have ever had. Through all the mountain top experiences and through all the difficult moments, God was there with us even if we didn’t recognize his presence. So, consider all of those moments that brought you to your knees in anguish, wondering just where God was, the truth is that God was indeed right there with you. Through every hurt, every pain, through every bewilderment, through every moment of overwhelming loss, and every unmet expectation, through these all the grace of God assures us that God was there with us.This is why Paul calls our Heavenly Father, the one who searches our hearts, the one who is one with the Spirit who groans with groans too deep for words, because we know that our God is always present with us, the one who knows that which affects us at the very center of our being.This is what we know to be the truth because of what Jesus has accomplished for us.
When we understand this about God, how he has always been present with us, then we begin to understand that the way that we enter into relationship with this God who is ever present with us is through this idea of hope. Hope is that which we anticipate, that which we would gladly welcome its arrival, that which we expect to be certain to happen. As Paul tells us in our scripture for today, he had heard of his readers faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that they had for the saints because of the hope laid up for them in heaven. So, what comes first, before a decision of faith, before any action of love, is hope, but we must ask, what is it a hope in? This Paul explains is a hope of glory. This hope is just an out working of the grace we have begun to know because if we know that God has been with us where we have been then it follows that we will be with him where he will be, and since Christ was risen from the dead in the flesh and has ascended back to the side of his Father, then this is where we can hope to one day be. This hope then is much like a treasure that we desire. As Jesus spoke about the things we treasure, as found in the sixth chapter of Matthew, the treasures we lay up for ourselves on earth, those things we put our hope in, all of these things, Jesus tells us are subject to destruction either through moths eating them, or rust destroying them or these treasures might be taken from us by thieves. In other words, our world is a broken world where our treasures come to nothing and our hopes end up being shattered. This God understands because he has been with us in our sorrow when the things we anticipated didn’t happen, when our expectations became something far less than we expected. It is this hurt we experience that causes us to turn inward, to begin to only trust ourselves and in so doing making the world all about us. Into this comes a word, a true word, speaking of one who was the treasure of God that God allowed to be destroyed upon the cross all because he treasured us. Yet all was not lost, without hope, because God our Father raised his Son to life through the power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus was raised to life so that we might have new life, a life of hope, the hope of glory because as Jesus was raised we too shall be raised and as Jesus is now glorified so shall we also be. This is why Jesus, in speaking of treasures implores us to lay up our treasures in heaven. We are to treasure what is in heaven because it is there we find the one who treasures us. This is what the grace that goes before us does, it changes what we place our hope in so that we come to hope in the hope which changes us, the hope who is Jesus, our hope of glory. Amen.
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