Colossians 1:1-8 — Grace & Peace

LINDA BROWN: Heard. That is the word I cannot get past in these eight verses, and I want to know if I am making too much of it. Paul thanks God for a church because of what he has "heard" about them. Then they have "heard" the gospel. Then it has been growing "since the day you heard it." Three times, in what is basically a greeting card. An apostle is pouring out thanks for people he only knows by rumor.

FRANK EDWARDS: Rumor is close, and you are not making too much of it. Paul had never set foot in Colossae. Everything in this opening, every warm word about their faith and their love, reached him the way news reaches any of us... someone walked in the door and told him. So welcome to Dig Deeper, everyone, we are glad you are here. We are opening Colossians today, chapter one, verses one through eight, and the question underneath it is a strange one for an apostle to be answering. How much can you love a church you have only heard about?

LINDA BROWN: Read it for us, then. I want to hear all three "heards" in a row.

FRANK EDWARDS: Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother, To the saints and faithful brothers in Christ at Colossae: 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 about your faith in Christ Jesus and your love for all the saints, the faith and love proceeding from the hope stored up for you in heaven, of which you have already heard in the word of truth, the gospel that has come to you. All over the world this gospel is bearing fruit and growing, just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and truly understood the grace of God. You learned it from Epaphras, our beloved fellow servant, who is a faithful minister of Christ on our behalf, and who also informed us of your love in the Spirit.

LINDA BROWN: Epaphras walks in the door, then. Who is he, and where is Paul when this door gets walked through?

FRANK EDWARDS: Paul is in prison. Later in this same letter he says, "remember my chains," and most likely this is the Roman imprisonment, so picture a man under guard, restricted, dependent on whoever is allowed in to see him. And a man does come to see him, a man who has made a very long journey. Epaphras, as best we can reconstruct it, was someone Paul had trained years earlier during his long stay in Ephesus, a big port city on the western coast of Asia Minor. Colossae sits about a hundred miles inland from there, up the Lycus River valley, and it was Epaphras's hometown. So the chain of events is almost painfully ordinary. A man hears the gospel in the city, believes it, goes home, and tells his own people. That is how the church in Colossae began. Paul had nothing to do with it directly, and he says so plainly in chapter two, where he mentions believers who have not seen his face.

FRANK EDWARDS: And Colossae itself... this is worth a moment, because later episodes in this series are going to lean on it. It was not an impressive place by Paul's day. Centuries earlier it had been a real stop on the trade road through Phrygia. By now it was fading, overshadowed by its two neighbors down the valley, Laodicea and Hierapolis. The region was known for wool, a particular purple-dyed wool, and for mineral springs. Phrygians, Greeks, a settled Jewish community, ordinary commerce, ordinary mixed population. Nothing about it says "future site of a New Testament letter." It is a wool town that had seen better days. And the gospel that Paul says is bearing fruit "all over the world" took root there, in that unremarkable soil, through one local man who came home.

LINDA BROWN: A wool town in decline, and a church Paul never saw, and the only report he has is from the guy who started it. I am going to say the skeptical thing. If I told you a church across the country was thriving, and my only source was the founder of that church, you would raise an eyebrow. Isn't Paul's whole thanksgiving here a little thin?

FRANK EDWARDS: Thin is the wrong word, though I understand why it feels that way. Think about what Paul is actually doing with the report. He is not evaluating a ministry, the way a board evaluates a church plant. He is thanking God. The direction of the sentence is upward. "We always thank God when we pray for you, because we have heard." The hearing is the occasion, but the object of the thanks is God, and what he is thanking God for is evidence of God's own work. Faith in Christ. Love for all the saints. Those are not achievements Epaphras could have manufactured or exaggerated into existence. If they are there, God put them there. So Paul can receive the report with open hands, because if it is true, and he has every reason to trust this man, then the credit was never going to land on Epaphras or on Paul anyway.

FRANK EDWARDS: And there is one more thing about how this letter arrived that I think changes the feel of the opening. There were no printed copies. This letter came to them in the hands of Tychicus, with Onesimus beside him, while Epaphras stayed with Paul, and it was read aloud to the whole congregation gathered in a house. Most people could not read, and even those who could met texts by hearing them. So when the reader got to "your faith in Christ Jesus and your love for all the saints," those people heard their own faith described back to them, out loud, together, by an apostle in chains who had never met them. Their love had traveled a hundred miles and across a sea and come back as thanksgiving. The letter was an event in a room, not a note in a drawer.

LINDA BROWN: The report is what set Paul praying, and then the prayer is what came back and got read to their faces. That is what you are saying? The secondhand news went out and returned as a blessing on the people who were the news.

FRANK EDWARDS: Returned, and returned with more in it than it left with. Because Paul does not just repeat what he heard. He tells them where their faith and love came from, and this is the sentence the passage turns on. "The faith and love proceeding from the hope stored up for you in heaven." Three words Paul uses constantly, faith, hope, love, and you can find them in First Corinthians thirteen and First Thessalonians one and here, but watch the ordering in Colossae. Faith reaches back, it grasps what Christ has already done. Love reaches out, toward all the saints, the people actually in the room. And hope reaches forward. But Paul says the first two proceed from the third. Hope is not the sweet dessert at the end. Hope is the root system. Their faith and their love are growing out of something already secured somewhere else.

LINDA BROWN: I'm skeptical, honestly, and I want you to earn it. Hope, in my life, is the weakest of those three. Hope is what I have when I do not have anything else. "I hope it works out." Fingers crossed. How is the flimsiest word in the set supposed to be holding up the other two?

FRANK EDWARDS: Because the word Paul uses for what happens to this hope is not flimsy at all. "Stored up," your translation says. The Greek is apokeimai, and it is a term you would use of treasure laid away in a vault, or a reward set aside and reserved for a particular person, held in a guarded place until the day it is handed over. Peter uses the same idea in his first letter, "an inheritance that is imperishable, reserved in heaven for you." So Paul is not talking about the feeling you work up when the news is bad. He is talking about a deposit that has already been made, in your name, in the one place moth and rust and a fading economy in the Lycus Valley cannot reach. The hope is the thing in the vault, not the emotion you have about the vault.

FRANK EDWARDS: And now the ordering makes sense, doesn't it? Why can these people love "all the saints," which in a mixed town of Phrygians and Greeks and Jews means loving people who are not like you and may not like you back? Because they are not scrambling to secure their own future. It is secured. Someone whose retirement is already funded can afford to be generous with what is in the checking account. Someone whose future is a gamble hoards. A settled future produces an open-handed present. That is the controlling idea of these eight verses in one sentence, and theologians have a name for the larger doctrine underneath it, the perseverance or preservation of the saints. God keeps what he has laid away. Your grip may loosen. The vault does not.

LINDA BROWN: The hope is a deposit already made, and the faith and love are what a person can afford once they stop protecting themselves. [short pause] I will admit that reads differently than "fingers crossed." Which brings up the other picture in the passage, though, because Paul switches from vaults to farms. "Bearing fruit and growing." Why the sudden agriculture?

FRANK EDWARDS: Agriculture is the oldest language in the Bible for what God's word does. Go to the very first page. "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth." That is God's first commission to the human race, and Paul's "growing" is the same verb the Greek Old Testament uses in that first command to increase and multiply. Paul is not grabbing a random metaphor because it sounds pretty. He is announcing that the filling of the earth God intended from creation is finally underway, only now what fills it is a new humanity in Christ. And behind that sits Isaiah fifty-five, where God says his word is like rain that makes the earth bud and flourish, and "it will not return to me empty, it will accomplish what I please." Centuries before there was a church in Colossae, God bound his word to a harvest.

FRANK EDWARDS: So put the two images together, the vault and the field. The seed is the "word of truth," the gospel. It was carried up a valley by a wool-town man. It landed in ordinary hearts, and Paul says it has been bearing fruit "since the day you heard it and truly understood the grace of God." That verb, "truly understood," is epiginōskō, and it means more than hearing a fact go by. It is the knowing that arrives, that closes the distance, the way you know a person rather than know about them. Calvin puts his finger right on that line in his commentary, "Since the day ye heard it, and knew the grace." Hearing and knowing, side by side. The day the news about grace stopped being information and became theirs, that is the day the growing started. And the same word is producing the same fruit in Rome and in Ephesus and, Paul says, all over the world. The power is in the seed and the Sower. Not in the soil.

LINDA BROWN: Not in the soil. I want to hold that against the part of this that actually costs something, because so far this passage has been very kind to the Colossians and I am not sure it is kind to me. Paul says "we always thank God when we pray for you." Always. For people he has never met. I have people I have met, people I see this week, people whose names come up in my head and I change the subject in my own head. I reach for the phone. I do not pray for them, and I certainly do not thank God for them. That is what this asks, isn't it? Named prayer, for the person I would rather not think about.

FRANK EDWARDS: Named prayer for the person you would rather not think about, yes, and thanksgiving for them where there is anything to thank God for. And notice that Paul does not draw his warmth from his own reserves. He is in chains. He has every reason to be preoccupied with his own situation. What frees him to spend his prayers on a wool town he will never visit is that his own future is already in the vault. He can afford it. The person listening who cannot get past a name this week is usually protecting something, and the passage's answer is not "try harder to be nice." It is that there is nothing left to protect. The Spirit who prayed through a prisoner for strangers is the same Spirit Paul says produced the Colossians' "love in the Spirit," and he is not less available now.

LINDA BROWN: And that raises Epaphras one more time, because his job in this passage is so small it is almost embarrassing. He did not write the letter. He is barely a footnote in church history. He heard something, went home, told the truth about it, and then carried a good report about ordinary people to someone who could bless them. That is the entire chain that gets a book of the Bible written.

FRANK EDWARDS: The entire chain, and Paul's name for him is telling. "Our beloved fellow servant," syndoulos, literally a fellow slave. Paul, the apostle, and Epaphras, the nobody from the wool town, wearing the same title. The gospel does not need famous carriers. It needs faithful ones, people willing to bring the word of truth to people who have never seen an apostle, and then willing to carry back the news of what grew. Someone in your week would be strengthened simply by knowing you thanked God for them out loud. That is an Epaphras-sized task, and it is the one the passage actually shows us.

LINDA BROWN: Hold that next to your week, then. Somewhere between here and Sunday there is a person you know only by report, or a person you know too well, and this passage is asking one thing of you. Pray for them by name, and if there is anything of God in them, thank him for it out loud, so the news travels the way it traveled from Colossae.

FRANK EDWARDS: And whatever else you hold onto from today, hold that one word, "stored up." The treasure is already kept for you. Nothing left to earn, only to receive, and then to spend freely on the people in the room.

LINDA BROWN: Dig Deeper is free, and you can find it at dig deeper dot A I.

FRANK EDWARDS: Thanks for opening this letter with us. We will see you next time.