Colossians 4:5-6 — Wise Outsiders

FRANK EDWARDS: Most of what the world will ever hear about Jesus, it will hear from a Christian who is not preaching. A shopkeeper. A coworker on a smoke break. Somebody's neighbor at the mailbox. That is how it worked in the first century, and it is still how it works, and Paul knows it, which is why the last piece of teaching in this letter before the greetings start is about how you talk.

LINDA BROWN: Two verses on how to talk, and he saves them for the end. Welcome to Dig Deeper, everybody, glad you're with us. We are in Colossians four today, verses five and six, and I'll say up front, I read these and my first reaction is... this sounds like the polite little reminder you put at the bottom of the memo. Be nice to people. Frank, read it for us, and then talk me out of that.

FRANK EDWARDS: Colossians four, five and six. "Act wisely toward outsiders, redeeming the time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone."

LINDA BROWN: Outsiders. That is the word I want to start on, because it sounds cold to a modern ear. Us and them. Insiders and outsiders. Is Paul drawing a line around the church there, or is something else going on?

FRANK EDWARDS: Something else, and it helps to remember who is hearing this read aloud. The little congregation in that bypassed valley town we talked about, most of them ordinary people, some of them slaves, all of them surrounded by neighbors who worship a crowded shelf of gods and who look at this new sect with real suspicion. Christians in Colossae have no temples, no political standing, no numbers. They are a watched minority, and every one of them knows it. So when Paul says "those who are outside," he is not issuing a verdict on anybody. He is describing a location. These are the people across the counter from you, the master who owns your labor, the official who could make your life very difficult on a whim. The line is already there. Paul is telling them how to live on their side of it. And the weight of that is this... for most of those pagan neighbors, the conversation at the public fountain, the haggling in the market, the way a believing slave speaks to a master who has just been unfair, that is the only sermon they will ever hear. There is no other channel. So how a Christian speaks to a shopkeeper is not the memo at the bottom. It is the pulpit.

LINDA BROWN: The outsider is a location, then, not a judgment, and the conversation is the pulpit. I can hold that. But then he says "redeeming the time," and that phrase does nothing for me. It sounds like a productivity slogan. Get more out of your hours. Why is that sitting in the middle of a verse about neighbors?

FRANK EDWARDS: Because the English hides a merchant's word. Paul writes exagorazō, and the picture inside it is the agora, the open market. To exagorazō something is to buy it up, to purchase it out of the public stock and take it home as your own. This is not a clock ticking down. It is a hand at a stall closing on a limited supply before it is gone. And it is not a random word for Paul. It is the very verb he uses in Galatians when he says Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. The commercial word for buying someone out of the slave market, that word, is the one he reaches for when he talks about your ordinary afternoons.

FRANK EDWARDS: Now put that next to Ephesians, where he says nearly the same sentence to the church down the road, "redeeming the time, because the days are evil." The days are not neutral. Something else is bidding for the same hours. Gossip is bidding. Fear is bidding. The instinct to keep your head down in a hostile town is bidding. So the wise believer walks up to the counter and buys the moment back for a better use. And I think this is the part that should stop us, because the same verb that describes what Christ did for you at the cross now describes what you do with a hallway conversation. He purchased you out of bondage, at the price of his blood, and the freed person turns around and starts purchasing minutes for his glory. The redeemed become redeemers of time. Does that still sound like a slogan to you?

LINDA BROWN: A stall, not a clock. No, that is a different picture entirely, and honestly a heavier one, because a clock just runs and I am not responsible for it. A stall means I walked past something I could have bought. That changes the next question, though, because then he gets to the salt, and salt to me is a shaker on the table. Make your words tasty. After a word like exagorazō, "be a little more flavorful" feels like a letdown.

FRANK EDWARDS: Salt in a shaker is exactly the thing a modern reader has to unlearn. In the Roman world salt was a commodity, weighed and measured and worth real money. Soldiers were sometimes paid partly in it. And this valley in particular knew the trade, because there were salt lakes and springs in the region, and hauling and guarding salt was old business in western Asia Minor long before Paul wrote a word. A household budgeted for it. Why? Because salt was what stood between you and rot. A cut of meat left out in that heat was spoiled by the next day. Rubbed with salt, it kept through the long season. Salt arrested decay. That was its glory, before it was ever about taste.

FRANK EDWARDS: So the verb here, artuō, is the word for what you do to food to make it fit to eat. And when Paul says let your speech be seasoned with salt, he is saying more than "make your words pleasant." He is saying, in a marketplace full of flattery and gossip and talk gone foul, let your tongue be the thing that keeps the conversation from turning. Matthew Henry put it in a sentence three hundred years ago: "Grace is the salt which seasons our discourse, and keeps it from corrupting." Keeps it from corrupting. That is the preserving agent. And behind Paul stands Jesus himself, telling his followers on the hillside, "You are the salt of the earth." A believer's words were meant to preserve, to sting where something needed stinging, and never to lose their savor.

LINDA BROWN: If salt is what keeps the meat from going bad, then gracious speech is what keeps a room from going bad. That I can picture, a conversation curdling and one person refusing to let it. But you just said sting. Salt stings. And the verse says gracious. Those sound like opposites to me. Gracious is soft, salt is sharp. Which one does Paul actually want?

FRANK EDWARDS: Both, and he does not think they are opposites, which is the point. Grace makes the gospel palatable without making it soft. Think of Proverbs, "a gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger." The gentle answer there is not a weak one. It is the one that still gets said, and gets heard, because it did not arrive as a fist. Or take Peter, who presses the very same charge, "always be prepared to give a defense to everyone who asks you the reason for the hope that you have," and then adds the clause people skip, "with gentleness and respect." A defense, with gentleness. The content has a spine. The delivery has grace. And look at how Paul ends our verse... "so that you may know how to answer everyone." The word there really is each one. Not a script you recite at every person, but a wisdom that knows this neighbor needs a plain answer and that one needs a question and this master needs you to say less, and to say it kindly.

LINDA BROWN: Which is where this gets sharp for me, and I want to be honest about it rather than nod. There is a person in my week who I have quietly filed away. Somebody outside the faith who makes it awkward, who needles, who brings up the thing I don't want to defend. My whole strategy with that person is a clipped answer and an exit. [short pause] And you can tell me the word means arrest the rot, and I believe you, but I cannot manufacture gentle toward that person by deciding to. It is not in me on the day.

FRANK EDWARDS: If you cannot manufacture it, then Paul is not asking you to, and the proof is one paragraph back in the letter. Chapter three, verse sixteen, "Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly." Then verse seventeen, whatever you do, in word or deed, do it in the name of the Lord Jesus. That is the soil these two verses grow out of. Paul has spent three chapters lifting their eyes to the towering Christ, the image of the invisible God, in whom all the fullness dwells, who made peace by the blood of his cross. And now that same gospel comes down to the level of a sentence spoken to somebody who does not believe it yet. The doctrine of Christ's supremacy does not float above ordinary talk. It flavors it. What comes out of the mouth toward the outsider is what Christ has already poured in. This is the doctrine of union with Christ doing quiet work at the break room table, the truth that his life is in you now, by his Spirit, and it is his gentleness and not yours that has to show up.

FRANK EDWARDS: And there is a longer thread here. God has always been a speaking God. He created by a word. He called Abraham by a word. He became flesh as the Word. And then he spoke grace to you, in the gospel, when you were the one on the outside... hostile, avoiding him, filing him away. He did not give you a clipped answer and leave the room. So your kindness in a hard conversation is not something you generate. It is God's own gracious speech finding a new mouth. You received it first. Now it overflows. What would it cost you, do you think, to stay in that room?

LINDA BROWN: Comfort, mostly. That is the honest answer. It would cost me the exit I have planned. And I notice it doesn't require a speech, which I appreciate, because I was bracing for "and then you deliver the four spiritual laws." It sounds smaller than that. Don't match the sarcasm. Ask one real question about his life and actually wait for the answer. If faith comes up, say the true thing once, plainly, and let it rest. Then stay. Is that too small a reading of "answer everyone"?

FRANK EDWARDS: Small is the right size, and Scripture has been teaching this posture for a very long time. There is an old exile buried under this verse. When God's people are hauled off to Babylon, Jeremiah tells them, build houses, plant gardens, seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you, pray for it, because in its peace you will find your own. That is the deep root beneath Colossians. Living wisely toward outsiders is not a novel Christian idea. It is the ancient calling of a holy people planted among those who do not know God, told to bless rather than withdraw. And then think of Daniel, serving a pagan empire so faithfully that his enemies could find no fault in him except his devotion to God. His conduct toward outsiders was itself the answer, given before anybody asked a question. A life carefully lived among unbelievers can preach more loudly than a speech, and it earns the speech when the speech is finally wanted.

LINDA BROWN: The conduct and the words are one witness, then. Not two assignments, act wise and also talk nice, but one thing seen from two sides. Daniel's work was already the answer, so when the question came he had somewhere to stand.

FRANK EDWARDS: One witness. And what you have not said yet is why Paul needed it to be one, because a watched minority cannot afford to have those two split. Gracious words from a person whose conduct is careless spoil like meat in the heat. Careful conduct from a person who never opens their mouth leaves the neighbor with an example and no explanation. Salt does both jobs. It preserves and it seasons. So here is the one thing I would want to stay with you out of these two verses. The grace you have received from Christ is not only how God treats you. It is meant to become the texture of how you speak to people who do not know him yet. Turn that over today. The same grace that bought you at the market is what makes your next hard sentence worth hearing.

LINDA BROWN: Then let me put the question to the listener instead of answering it for you, because Paul's verse ends on a question, really. Who is on the outside of your week, the person you nod at and hurry past, or the one you have quietly written off... and what would it look like to buy that moment back, just once, before the stall closes? Pray for that person by name today. And stay in the room.

FRANK EDWARDS: This conversation is part of the Dig Deeper app, and if you don't have it yet, you'll find Dig Deeper in your app store.