Listen for God’s word to you from Colossians 2:1-7…
I want you to know how hard I am contending for you and for those at Laodicea, and for all who have not met me personally. My goal is that they may be encouraged in heart and united in love, so that they may have the full riches of complete understanding, in order that they may know the mystery of God, namely, Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. I tell you this so that no one may deceive you by fine-sounding arguments. For though I am absent from you in body, I am present with you in spirit and delight to see how disciplined you are and how firm your faith in Christ is.
So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, 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.
In this passage Paul talks about his goals for the church in Colossae. Out of this we can draw what William Barclay has called “8 Marks of the Faithful Church”. Let’s examine them one by one…
1. Courage
Paul says, “My goal is that they may be encouraged in heart…”
The Greek word for “encouraged” is one that we have met many times before. Παρακαλέω literally means “to call alongside”. It can be translated in different ways: to exhort, to encourage, to comfort, to urge. In the Gospel of John, the Holy Spirit is called the Paraclete, using the noun form of this same word. And so, in some of our English translations, the Holy Spirit is called the Advocate, the Encourager, the Comforter. The Holy Spirit is the ultimate one who, sent by Jesus, comes alongside of us, puts his arm around us, and gives us the courage to keep going in life.
The faithful church is, first and foremost, one that is filled with the Holy Spirit and is therefore a courageous church. In this regard the picture that first comes to my mind is a picture of the apostolic church. Think of what the first apostles were like after the crucifixion of Jesus. They all went into hiding. They were cowering in fear. They were dejected. They returned, sheepishly, to their former lives. They went back to fishing.
But then Jesus rose again from the dead. Jesus appeared to each of his disciples. He literally breathed new life into them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” (John 20:22) And as a result, the disciples became changed people. Acts 4:13 says that when the Jewish religious leaders “saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished, and they took note that these men had been with Jesus.”
Courage remains the sign of having been with Jesus. He is the One who encourages our hearts and lifts us up!
2. Love
The second sign Paul mentions of the faithful church is love. “My goal is that they may be encouraged in heart and united in love…” A more literal translation would read: having been knit together in love.
Again, that is what the Holy Spirit does for us. The moment we put our faith in Jesus, we become part of his body, part of his family, the church. And the Holy Spirit knits us together in love.
In 1970, Francis Schaeffer wrote a little book called The Mark of the Christian in which he maintained that love is the mark of the church. Schaeffer wrote:
The church is to be a loving church in a dying culture. How, then, is the dying culture going to consider us? Jesus says, “By this all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” In the midst of the world, in the midst of our present dying culture, Jesus is giving a right to the world. Upon his authority he gives the world the right to judge whether you and I are born-again Christians on the basis of our observable love toward all Christians.
William Barclay puts the issue even more dramatically…
Without love there can be no such thing as a Church. The method of Church government is of no importance; the ritual of a Church is of no importance. These things are things which may change from time to time and from place to place. The one mark which should distinguish a true Church is love for God and love for the brethren. When love dies, the Church dies. When love is there, the Church is strong, because when love is there Jesus Christ, the Lord of love, is also there.
Do we have the mark? Are we actively loving one another across political, social, and even theological divides? Jesus says that love is the mark by which the world will know that we are his disciples.
3. Wisdom
A third mark of the faithful church that Paul identifies is wisdom. Paul says:
My goal is that they may be encouraged in heart and united in love, so that they may have the full riches of complete understanding, in order that they may know the mystery of God, namely, Christ, 3 in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
According to Paul, the church of Jesus Christ is equipped with every kind of wisdom. Paul uses three different words to describe this wisdom…
In verse 2 he uses the word σύνεσις. The NIV translates this word as “understanding”. Barclay defines this as “critical knowledge”. He says,
It is the ability to apply first principles to any given situation; it is the assured ability to assess any situation and to decide what practical course of action is necessary within it. A real Church will have the practical knowledge of what to do whenever action is called for.
Paul makes it clear in 1 Corinthians that every member of the church has a spiritual gift. And among those spiritual gifts are the gifts of wisdom and knowledge.
The other key words Paul uses in Colossians are σοφίας and γνῶσις. Barclay says,
Gnosis is the power to apprehend the truth; it is almost intuitive and instinctive; it is the power to grasp the truth when we see it and hear it, and when, as it were, it flashes on us. But Sophia is the power to support and to confirm and to commend the truth with wise and intelligent argument and presentation, once it has been intuitively grasped.
Paul tells us that all wisdom is hidden in Christ. The word he uses for hidden is ἀπόκρυφοι. We get our word Apocrypha from this Greek word.
The Gnostics who rose to prominence in the second century believed that they had a hidden gnosis given only to them and passed on to their inner circle. Paul seems to be responding here to an early form of Gnosticism, and he is saying, “No, all wisdom is hidden in Christ, and it is made available, it is revealed, to anyone who asks for it.”
Do we long for the wisdom of Jesus? All we must do is ask for it. As James 1:5 says, “If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you.”
4. Power
A fourth mark of the faithful church that we see in this passage is power. Specifically, it is the power to resist seductive teaching. Paul says that he is telling the Colossians about the wisdom found in Christ so that “no one may deceive you by fine-sounding arguments.”
“Fine sounding arguments” is one word in Greek: πιθανολογίᾳ. This was a word used of a lawyer’s argument. We are all familiar, from movies, if not from real life, how a trial lawyer can persuade a jury of the innocence of a criminal who really ought to go to prison for their crimes. Some politicians and preachers have this power too, the power of swaying an audience and causing people to believe things that are not true. That’s one reason why I would always urge you to check out the things I am saying and weigh them against Scripture.
We need to be like the Bereans that we read about in Acts 17…
Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.
The faithful church is the one that isn’t swayed by fine sounding arguments but rather has the power and wisdom to judge all teaching according to Scripture.
5. Discipline
A fifth mark of the faithful church is discipline. Paul tells the Colossians that he delights to see how disciplined they are and how firm their faith in Christ is.
Paul uses two words here that have a military origin. The word translated as “discipline” is τάξιν. This word refers to a rank or an ordered arrangement. From it we get our English word “taxonomy”. Paul is suggesting that the church ought to be like an ordered army with every soldier in their appropriate place, ready to take orders from our commander in chief, Jesus Christ.
The word translated as “firm” is στερέωμα. In the military world this word was used to describe “an army set out in an unbreakable square, solidly immovable against the shock of the charge of the enemy.” (Barclay)
In the Bible this term often refers to the sky or heavens as a solid, established structure. The term reflects the order and stability of God’s creation.
Aristotle used this word to speak of that which furnishes a foundation, on which a thing rests firmly.
We sing about this in a hymn…
How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord,
is laid for your faith in his excellent word!
What more can he say than to you he hath said,
to you who for refuge to Jesus have fled?
In the same way that an army stands firm, God’s creation stands firm, and his word stands firm, so also the church must stand firm. As G. K. Chesterton once wrote, “We do not want a church that will move with the world. We want a church that will move the world.”
6. In Christ
A sixth mark of the faithful church, a mark that goes to the core of what the church is all about, is that she is in Christ. Paul says, “So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him…”
Paul is heaping metaphor upon metaphor to describe what the church ought to be like. He suggests that the church ought to be like a tree rooted in Christ. This is a picture drawn from the Old Testament. In Jeremiah 17 we read…
But blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord,
whose confidence is in him.
They will be like a tree planted by the water
that sends out its roots by the stream.
It does not fear when heat comes;
its leaves are always green.
It has no worries in a year of drought
and never fails to bear fruit.
Just so, Paul says, we are to be rooted in Christ. But then Paul also says we are to be built up in him. Paul uses a word that speaks of a house built on a strong and firm foundation. In Matthew 24:7 Jesus says…
Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock.
Are we in Christ? Are we rooted and built up in him? How do we get “in Christ” in the first place? Paul tells us how. We do it by receiving Christ Jesus as Lord. Have you received Jesus not only as Savior, but also as Lord, as the leader of your life?
7. Holding Fast
A seventh mark of the faithful church is that she holds fast to the faith she has received. The NIV refers to us being strengthened in the faith as we were taught. A better translation would be confirmed.
In the Greco-Roman world, the concept of confirmation was significant in legal and social contexts. Contracts, covenants, and agreements required confirmation to be considered binding and reliable. In the Jewish world, the confirmation of God’s promises and covenants was central to the faith, emphasizing God’s unchanging nature and faithfulness.
Think about the process of Confirmation in the church. Confirmation ought to offer to people the opportunity to examine the faith, to ask questions, to test it, and discover its truth and solidity and applicability to life.
But holding fast to our faith does not mean becoming frozen in orthodoxy. After all, even in this letter Paul develops some new lines of thinking about Jesus. Still, holding fast to the faith does mean that there are certain core beliefs that are part of the foundation of our faith, and these do not change. We have some of these beliefs summed up in The Apostles’ Creed as one example.
The great church historian from Yale, Jaroslav Pelikan, once wrote: “Tradition is the Living faith of the dead; Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.” I believe that the faithful church pursues tradition but not traditionalism.
8. Gratitude
The final mark of the faithful church that Paul mentions is gratitude. Paul says that we ought to be overflowing with thankfulness.
Robert Rainey once said, “Joy is the flag which is flown from the castle of the heart when the King is in residence there.”
Epictetus was a Greek Stoic philosopher who lived from AD 50 to 135. He was not a Christian but nonetheless he wrote this…
What else can I, a lame old man, do but sing hymns to God? If, indeed, I were a nightingale, I would be singing as a nightingale; if a swan, as a swan. But, as it is, I am a rational being, therefore I must be singing hymns of praise to God. This is my task; I do it, and will not desert this post, as long as it may be given me to fill it; and I exhort you to join with me in this same song.[1]
If a non-Christian, who knew not the love of God made known in Jesus Christ, could say this, then how much more ought we to overflow with gratitude to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ? The Christian ought always to be a person who praises God from whom all blessings flow…
Sam Duncannan was a simple soul who had a great desire to do something for the Lord. So, he made it his practice to cut out pictures from cards and magazines and to paste on to these pictures some appropriate verses and poems and then to give these simple gifts to those whom he felt would be blessed by them. One day, Sam came across a picture of Niagara Falls, but for a long time could find no poem appropriate for the picture. Then he heard the hymn by Philip Bliss entitled “Have you on the Lord believed?” The first verse of the hymn goes like this: “Have you on the Lord believed? Still, there’s more to follow; Of his grace have you received? Still, there’s more to follow.” Sam wrote those lines under the picture of Niagara Falls and entitled it “More to Follow”. With Jesus there is always more to follow. And so, how can we not be overflowing with thankfulness?
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