Some of the roles Paul names may sound familiar to us. We hear him talking about wives and husbands or children and parents, and we think, oh yeah, we’re in those kind of relationships too. Other roles, like slaves and slave-masters, immediately sound more foreign to us. I need to warn you, though, that even where we might see similarities, life two thousand years ago was very different from the way we live today. Marriage then and family then looked nothing like marriage and family today. If we want to apply Paul’s instructions to our lives today correctly, we must not forget about these differences over time.
Some Christians today look at passages like this one, where Paul lays out how believers then could have Christ-like relationships, and they jump directly to how people should live in our relationships today. They’ll point to v 18 where Paul tells the married Colossian women to submit to your husbands, and they’ll insist that it’s God’s will today just as much as then that all women do whatever their husbands demand of them. It’s good that they want to obey the Bible, but unfortunately they fail to pay attention to the particular details of the passages they’re trying to apply. If we interpret this passage this way, we miss out on how Paul tailors his instructions to the unique circumstances of people in that city at that time.
In these verses, Paul takes the general command to live “in the name of the Lord Jesus” and applies it to the individual, concrete circumstances of believers in the Colossian fellowship. He’s bringing the command to love home to the specific, historical situation in which they lived. It’s important that we remember that sin has broken everything--every relationship, every social role or structure. When Paul gave instructions these believers about how to live in their relationships, he was operating something like a doctor, prescribing therapy to people living with various illnesses. Married people need certain therapies, parents with children need others, slaves and slave-masters, still others. [. . .]
When Paul gave these instructions to the married Colossian women, he wasn’t giving them the keys to a happy marriage. This wasn’t advice to get their husbands to treat them better. No, instead Paul was giving them the basics of how to still love like Jesus even when they lived in a horrible situation. They couldn’t change anything, so they were to trust God to set things right, just like God did for Jesus. Paul expresses this outlook most strongly at the end of his instruction to the Colossian slaves. In vv 24 and 25, he tells them, You know that it is the Lord who will repay your [glorious] inheritance. You serve the Lord Christ. For the one who does wrong will be repaid for his wrongdoing, and there is no favoritism [in this judgment]. God kept track of their suffering, of their selfless and often-ignored acts of love, and God would reward them. God also kept track of those who took advantage of this wicked system, and even if they seemed mighty and invulnerable at the moment, God would show no favoritism it came time to punish the wicked, even if the wicked had been powerful people.
Paul doesn’t ignore those people who could change these evil circumstances. Believe it or not, some of those husbands, harsh fathers, and slave-masters were part of the congregation. While there was undoubtedly the exceptional kind male head of house, like Philemon, the entire world these men lived in encouraged them to think of slaves, women, and children as nothing but tools to expand their wealth and political influence.
Paul’s command for them is brief and basic. While he honors the women, children, and slaves with six verses, he spends only three talking to these high and mighty men. But if the men were to follow these simple instructions, they would begin to undo all the injustice and abuse their wealth and power depended on. [. . .]
Our lives today would be unrecognizable to these believers living in Colossae. In fact, I’ve had several conversations with some of you about how different marriage and family life is today even than it was one or two generations ago. Our culture expects different things from marriage. We treat our children dramatically differently. Slavery is almost a curse word in this country. But just as much as those believers Paul wrote to, we need to discover what it means for us to live all of our lives “in the name of the Lord Jesus” within our own broken social relationships and structures.
Paul, in Phil 2, describes that church-community as “stars shining in a darkened sky,” and Jesus describes his followers as “the light of the world” causing people who see how they live to “glorify their Father in heaven.” This is what I want for our fellowship here. But if we are to shine, Jesus’ love must come home to where we live. It’s one thing to nod along with Paul’s exhortations to be compassionate, kind, meek, humble, and patient. It’s quite another to know what that means in our twenty-first century roles and relationships.
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Paul says, Whatever you do, whether in word or in deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, full of thanksgiving to God the Father through him. These are the words I want us to wrestle with this morning. How can we today do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus?
Paul begins to answer this question in the next verses for the original home fellowship of believers in Colossae. He goes through a commonsense list of roles and relationships, suggesting, very briefly, where the people in those relationships might begin if they want to figure out how to do everything in the name of Jesus. He offers a pictures for wives and children and slaves, and also husbands and parents and slave-masters. But his instructions are only thumbnail sketches of lifestyles they’ll still need to work at figuring out in more detail.
When I first read this passage, I thought I’d spend this morning talking about a list of ways we can live like Jesus in our relationships today. If the original audience in their house church in Colossae needed to work at this, we certainly do too.
But as I spent more time with Paul’s instructions to those believers, I felt more and more convicted that I should address how we apply the instructions and poems and stories of Scripture to our lives. After all, if we’re going to follow Paul’s command to do everything “in the name of the Lord Jesus,” we need to apply this concretely here where we live, in our weekday and weekend actions and thoughts and attitudes, even though or world is very different from the world of first-century Christians.
This morning we announced that Cindy and I plan to be part of this fellowship for the foreseeable future. I’m honored and excited that you’ve asked me to serve you as your pastor. As a new pastor here, I have a lot to learn. I need to learn how best to encourage and challenge you as you follow Jesus and how to comfort when the going gets tough.
But some things I know already. I know, for instance, that the heart of my ministry is leading us together to discover how to live all of our lives, even the details of our lives, in the name of Jesus. As I’ve repeated a few times in these last weeks, the whole purpose of our church is to demonstrate what God’s reconciliation looks like. Our church community is the movie trailer, or what Paul calls the “down payment” or the “firstfruits,” of God’s kingdom. God saved us so our every word, every attitude, every action display what God is bringing for the whole world.
For us to live all of our lives as a witness to God’s reconciliation, we need first to understand what it means to live “in the name of the Lord Jesus.” After we investigate the meaning of that phrase, we’ll see what living this way meant for Paul’s original audience in Colossae. Finally, I’ll ask some questions about what living this way means for us.
Paul tells the believers to live their lives “in the name of the Lord Jesus.” Pause and listen to that phrase again: in the name of the Lord Jesus. We’re probably familiar with these words. We baptize people “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” We remember the story from Acts about Peter and John healing a crippled beggar “in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth.” But what does it really mean here in this letter?
Let me explain with a story about two of my friends who got married. Both people had recently come back to a commitment to Jesus after living pretty wild lives. They had discovered a new kind of fellowship and community in a local church, and in the process, they found each other. In fact, Stuart proposed to Marie publicly in the middle of a church sharing time. Maybe in the past they would have just moved in together, but they wanted to make a commitment in front of their friends at church so their community could hold them accountable. This was their new life, and they had no desire to go back to living as they had in past.
Now, in many Western societies it’s become normal for the woman to take the man’s last name when they get married. But Stu and Marie are quite creative people, and neither wanted to carry on the name of their individual pasts. They were through with that way of life. So, like the artistic people they are, Stu and Marie chose a new family name for themselves, made out of bits of their old names. They hoped that even their family name would identify them as people trying to live in a new way in a new community.
What I hope this story of my hippie friends illustrates is that our names are tied closely to our identities and the kind of lives we live. I’ve heard from a few people that when Cindy’s and my last name first came up in the pastoral search process, people knew immediately that I didn’t grow up in a traditional Mennonite family. Wallace isn’t a good, strong Mennonite name. Names, whether old or new, mean something.
Paul tells us that our words and actions should reflect Jesus’ name, Jesus’ identity. The way we live should identify us as Jesus’ followers just as much as a last name identifies us as part of a family. For Paul, this means living lives of compassion, kindness, humility, and patience, the virtues he lists in vv 12-14. But more than any one virtue, living up to Jesus’ name means imitating the kind of love that brought Jesus to the cross.
Paul always reminds his audience of the cross. Paul had been a devout Pharisee when Jesus met him on the road to Damascus. His hope then was in the renewal and restoration of his nation, a Messiah who would overthrow the occupying Roman armies, a Messiah who would reform the corrupt temple priesthood. Jesus’ career climaxed with a state execution; he didn’t fit the picture of a Messiah, a Christ. Instead of leading an army, he laid down his life. The Gospels tell us that when he was arrested, Jesus could have called 12,000 angels to overwhelm the mob, the corrupt priests, and the Roman soldiers. But instead he submitted himself to their authority and died on a Roman cross.
This isn’t how Paul would have thought a Messiah should act before Jesus radically changed his expectations on the way to Damascus. This shock, that someone who submitted to the most wicked powers in his world had been vindicated as the true Messiah when God raised him from death--well, the shock of it left an deep impression on Paul. If we look over to Paul’s letter to the Philippian believers, we hear Paul calling the fellowship there to imitate precisely this quality of Jesus’ life. In ch 2, he tells them that instead of pushing for their own desires, they must submit themselves to what other people want. Why? Because this is what Jesus the Messiah did. In Phil 2.5-8, he reminds them,
Jesus was in very nature God, but he did not consider equality with God as something be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a slave, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a human being, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death--even death on a cross!Giving up yourself so you can work for what’s best for others, that’s one way of defining love. It’s also one way of explaining what it means to do everything “in the name of the Lord Jesus.” When we give up ourselves for the sake of others, we identify ourselves with Jesus; this is what he did for us, both in his teaching and healing and especially through the way he died. When we give up working for what we want and start working for God’s best for others, we’re like Stu and Marie, leaving behind their pasts and taking on a new name, a new identity, a new lifestyle. Or, to bring back an image from last week, we’re putting on the new team’s jersey.
In Col 3.18-4.1, we see what Paul suggested imitating Jesus in self-sacrificing love meant for the real-life situation of the believers at Colossae. Paul lists one-by-one some of the roles and relationships that made up life for people living in first century Colossae, and for each of them, he points the direction they need to go if they want to live wholly “in Jesus’ name.”
Some of the roles Paul names may sound familiar to us. We hear him talking about wives and husbands or children and parents, and we think, oh yeah, we’re in those kind of relationships too. Other roles, like slaves and slave-masters, immediately sound more foreign to us. I need to warn you, though, that even where we might see similarities, life two thousand years ago was very different from the way we live today. Marriage then and family then looked nothing like marriage and family today. If we want to apply Paul’s instructions to our lives today correctly, we must not forget about these differences over time.
Some Christians today look at passages like this one, where Paul lays out how believers then could have Christ-like relationships, and they jump directly to how people should live in our relationships today. They’ll point to v 18 where Paul tells the married Colossian women to submit to your husbands, and they’ll insist that it’s God’s will today just as much as then that all women do whatever their husbands demand of them. It’s good that they want to obey the Bible, but unfortunately they fail to pay attention to the particular details of the passages they’re trying to apply. If we interpret this passage this way, we miss out on how Paul tailors his instructions to the unique circumstances of people in that city at that time.
In these verses, Paul takes the general command to live “in the name of the Lord Jesus” and applies it to the individual, concrete circumstances of believers in the Colossian fellowship. He’s bringing the command to love home to the specific, historical situation in which they lived. It’s important that we remember that sin has broken everything--every relationship, every social role or structure. When Paul gave instructions these believers about how to live in their relationships, he was operating something like a doctor, prescribing therapy to people living with various illnesses. Married people need certain therapies, parents with children need others, slaves and slave-masters, still others.
We can see this clearly enough if we look at even one of these situations. First century marriage was incredibly destructive. Its primary purpose wasn’t partnership or companionship. Women were often pried away from their mothers or nannies in tears when it was time to go to their new husbands’ homes. Marriage only served the men. It was the way they could be sure the son who would inherit the family property really was their son. After he had sown his wild oats, a man in his late twenties would find a girl in her early teens form a wealthy family to carry his child. He usually had little else to do with her, unless he wanted another child. She was his property, the tool he used to carry on the family name. While he was occupied with slave-girls or prostitutes, he kept his wife locked up on the family estate to make sure she stayed faithful.
So how would a woman trapped in this kind of evil situation imitate Jesus’ love in her relationship to her husband? When Paul give his prescription to these wives, I’m initially surprised. In v 18 he tells them, Married women, submit to your husbands, for this is the right way to relate in the Lord.
Paul’s prescription for these women in Colossae has been used in many wicked ways in the the two thousand years since then. Powerful men in churches, priests and pastors, have ripped these words out of context to tell women to stay with abusive husbands, just like they’ve used Paul’s instructions to Colossian adolescents in v 20 to ignore child abuse. This is evil. If you or someone you know is in a violent or abusive relationship, tell me or Pastor Bernie or someone on Spiritual Care, and we will help you get out. Living in the name of Jesus does not mean living with abuse when there are others to help you out. Please tell us, so we can help you find a way to safety.
We need to understand Paul’s instructions to specifically these married women, just like we need to understand his words to these children and slaves, in light of their specific horrible historical situation. For them, there was no way out. There was no safe place to go. Their whole society was built on this kind of abuse and oppression.
Unfortunately, there are still situations like that in our world. I’m haunted by the stories and images I see coming from Syria. I’m overwhelmed by the millions who live in the slum cities of the Global South. I remember the stories of child prostitution rings. I’m sickened by the fact that in a world with so many relatively wealthy Christians, we haven’t invested our wealth as well as our lives to change these hopeless situations.
It to those with no other hope in the world that Paul says, “Submit like Jesus did, and trust that God will redeem your lives.” For the hopeless, living like Jesus meant admitting that there is no human way to set things right and then choosing to act with love anyway. Living like Jesus for them meant finding a way to love even while they were caught in the nets of the broken social order.
Remember the story of the Exodus. God does the impossible! God redeems situations without hope. The Israelites were at the Red Sea, the waters in front of them, Pharaoh’s chariots behind them. They called out to Moses, “Was it because there were no grave in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die?” What did Moses say in response? Does he yell, “Run for your lives” or “Grab your weapons”? No, he said, “Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will se the deliverance Yahweh will bring you today. . . . Yahweh will fight for you; you need only be still” (Ex 14.11, 13-14).
Or remember Jesus. He came preaching that God’s kingdom was arriving. He went about healing people, casting out demons, forgiving and feeding the masses. But the broken human order, the temple priests, the Pharisees, and the Roman overlords were offended and opposed him, plotted to kill him. What did Jesus do? He both named and accepted his place in the broken order, and in the midst of it he loved even his enemies. Instead of crying out for revolution, he took up his cross and was executed. But then, as Paul says in Philippians 2,
God also exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. God worked through Jesus’ submission to set the world right.When Paul gave these instructions to the married Colossian women, he wasn’t giving them the keys to a happy marriage. This wasn’t advice to get their husbands to treat them better. No, instead Paul was giving them the basics of how to still love like Jesus even when they lived in a horrible situation. They couldn’t change anything, so they were to trust God to set things right, just like God did for Jesus. Paul expresses this outlook most strongly at the end of his instruction to the Colossian slaves. In vv 24 and 25, he tells them, You know that it is the Lord who will repay your [glorious] inheritance. You serve the Lord Christ. For the one who does wrong will be repaid for his wrongdoing, and there is no favoritism [in this judgment]. God kept track of their suffering, of their selfless and often-ignored acts of love, and God would reward them. God also kept track of those who took advantage of this wicked system, and even if they seemed mighty and invulnerable at the moment, God would show no favoritism it came time to punish the wicked, even if the wicked had been powerful people.
Paul doesn’t ignore those people who could change these evil circumstances. Believe it or not, some of those husbands, harsh fathers, and slave-masters were part of the congregation. While there was undoubtedly the exceptional kind male head of house, like Philemon, the entire world these men lived in encouraged them to think of slaves, women, and children as nothing but tools to expand their wealth and political influence.
Paul’s command for them is brief and basic. While he honors the women, children, and slaves with six verses, he spends only three talking to these high and mighty men. But if the men were to follow these simple instructions, they would begin to undo all the injustice and abuse their wealth and power depended on.
To the married men, he says, love your wives, and stop treating them harshly. To the fathers--for fathers did the official child-rearing in Colossae--he says, stop provoking your children, lest they lose heart. And to the slave-masters, he says, give what is right and fair to your slaves, since you know you also have a Master in heaven. Love, do justice, stop harming others. At a minimum living like Jesus means doing these things. But the lives these first century men led were so far out of sync with Jesus that Paul had to tell them to begin with the very basics. These powerful, counter-cultural basics.
Our lives today would be unrecognizable to these believers living in Colossae. In fact, I’ve had several conversations with some of you about how different marriage and family life is today even than it was one or two generations ago. Our culture expects different things from marriage. We treat our children dramatically differently. Slavery is almost a curse word in this country. But just as much as those believers Paul wrote to, we need to discover what it means for us to live all of our lives “in the name of the Lord Jesus” within our own broken social relationships and structures.
Paul, in Phil 2, describes that church-community as “stars shining in a darkened sky,” and Jesus describes his followers as “the light of the world” causing people who see how they live to “glorify their Father in heaven.” This is what I want for our fellowship here. But if we are to shine, Jesus’ love must come home to where we live. It’s one thing to nod along with Paul’s exhortations to be compassionate, kind, meek, humble, and patient. It’s quite another to know what that means in our twenty-first century roles and relationships.
How do we live in the name of the Lord Jesus in marriages today, marriages that are based on partnership and a desire for companionship? I’m sure this will look far different from wives and husbands in ancient Colossae: we are faced with our own sets of challenges. How do we live and love like Jesus as parents who want our children to feel loved? How should children respond to parents who are both authorities and friends to them? What about parents with adult children? Or adult children with aging parents? These were not even categories the believers at Colossae could imagine. The average life-expectancy for women then was 37 years. Nor would those believers have wondered how to live like Christ in retirement. People then worked until the bitter end. There were no retirement communities or assisted living facilities. Nor were there small business owners dealing with larger suppliers and trying to figure out how to treat their employees fairly. But these are realities that face us, and we must learn what loving like Jesus looks like in the world in which we live.
Lastly, and I think this is a very important question for us, we need to ask how we can live like Jesus when we have the relative wealth and political influence. The home fellowship Paul wrote his letter to were comprised mostly of slaves, children, and women who possessed next to nothing. We today have bank accounts. Most of the members then were disdained as non-citizens in their city meetings. What do we do today when our votes matter? When our dollars matter? How do we follow Jesus when we’re the ones with power? Would Jesus try to make live better for other people if he could have voted? I think so.
Some of these may be difficult questions to answer. But if we’re going to live up to our new name, the name of Christ, we need to discover what his love looks like where we live here and now.
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