To the Colossians 1:1-14 [NLTse]
This letter is from Paul, chosen by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus, and from our brother Timothy.
² We are writing to God’s holy people in the city of Colosse, who are faithful brothers and sisters in Christ.
May God our Father give you grace and peace.
³ We always pray for you, and we give thanks to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. ⁴ For we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and your love for all of God’s people, ⁵ which come from your confident hope of what God has reserved for you in Heaven. You have had this expectation ever since you first heard the truth of the Good News.
⁶ This same Good News that came to you is going out all over the world. It is bearing fruit everywhere by changing lives, just as it changed your lives from the day you first heard and understood the truth about God’s wonderful grace.
⁷ You learned about the Good News from Epaphras, our beloved co-worker. He is Christ’s faithful servant, and he is helping us on your behalf. ⁸ He has told us about the love for others that the Holy Spirit has given you.
⁹ So we have not stopped praying for you since we first heard about you. We ask God to give you complete knowledge of His will and to give you spiritual wisdom and understanding. ¹⁰ Then the way you live will always honor and please the Lord, and your lives will produce every kind of good fruit. All the while, you will grow as you learn to know God better and better.
¹¹ We also pray that you will be strengthened with all His glorious power so you will have all the endurance and patience you need. May you be filled with joy, ¹² always thanking the Father. He has enabled you to share in the inheritance that belongs to His people, who live in the light. ¹³ For He has rescued us from the kingdom of darkness and transferred us into the Kingdom of His dear Son, ¹⁴ Who purchased our freedom and forgave our sins.

Sermon – “Legacy: Planning For the End”

What kind of person do you want to be?

As many of you know, I turned fifty-one a little over two weeks ago. When I was a kid I don’t think I ever thought about myself. When I was a teen I only wondered what others thought about me. When I was in my twenties I focused more on how much money I could get and how much stuff I could acquire. In my thirties I thought a lot about what I could and would accomplish. Across my forties I compared myself a lot with those around me, looking to see how my life looked in comparison.

But now that I’ve hit the big “five-O” I realize that there’s likely more life behind me than there is ahead of me! And it’s gotten me starting to look at myself more closely, wondering: Who I am, really? What have I done? What am I leaving behind? Has my life mattered? Day by day, is my life mattering still?

It’s not a series of questions that have to wait until you’re my age. Although the vast majority of funerals I attend or am a part of are for older people, Jason Bell’s funeral yesterday, and Sandy Meyer’s many years ago; my wife, Amy’s, brother dying when he was twenty-three, and my brother dying when he was twenty-one, all remind me – and should remind us all! – that no matter how young and invulnerable we are or we feel, not one of us is promised another moment beyond the one we’re breathing in and our hearts are beating through right now…

Steven Covey of “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” fame has been encouraging readers to begin asking such questions across the past 20 years. And his son, Sean Covey, has been encouraging ever-younger readers to begin asking these same questions, as well:

What kind of person do you want to be?

As of the writing of this letter, the apostle Paul had never been to the city of Colossae, but in Colossians 1 Paul tells the church that he had heard about them. It seems they had quite the reputation.

As we ask ourselves what kind of person we want to be, finding out what kind of reputation we have can surely help us know what kind of person we have become. Whether it is a reputation you are happy about or a reputation that upsets you, as we think about the kind of person we want to be our reputation can help us know where we are now, which can help us begin planning how to get from here to there.

The Colossians’ reputation that the apostle Paul had heard about was that they were known for trusting in Christ and for loving their fellow Christians. A commendable reputation! The kind of reputation we have promised Jesus we would have when we got baptized!

It’s interesting to me that Paul doesn’t go on in his letter from there to simply commend the Colossians for their faith. No. The very next thing he does is commit to pray for them, and he says he will be praying for them for two reasons: (1) So that the way they live will always honor and please the Lord, and so that their lives will produce every kind of good fruit; and, (2) so that they will grow as they learn to know God better and better.

For the apostle Paul, he’s not just pleased to know who the Colossians are now, he’s concerned about the kind of people they will grow to be.

The Book of Numbers introduces us to a man named Caleb. Now, Caleb was the leader of the Tribe of Judah, even though Caleb was not a native-born Israelite. The Bible tells us that Caleb was a Kenizzite, from one of the wild, nomadic tribes that roamed the Sinai Peninsula in search of good pastureland. It seems that Caleb’s family, or perhaps his entire tribe, had become slaves alongside the Israelites in Egypt, and had embraced the Hebrew God as their own and afterwards joined with Israel. Caleb must have been a remarkable man and a remarkable man of faith, because, after the exodus, when God released the Israelites out of their slavery in Egypt, Caleb was the head of the Israelite tribe of Judah. And, after fleeing Egypt, and as Israel was about to enter into the land God had promised Israel’s ancestors – Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – as Judah’s chief elder, Caleb was sent along with the eleven other tribal heads to scout out the Promised Land.

Maybe you know the story, but after the twelve had thoroughly reconnoitered the land, ten of the tribal leaders came back and gave a discouraging report, with only Caleb and Moses’ successor, Joshua, giving and encouraging one.

Notes
It was during this new season of self-reflection that I picked up Gordon MacDonald’s bookThe Life God Blesses. A seasoned ministry veteran with a lot of life insight, he asked the question, “What kind of old man do you want to be?” He’d been reading the story of Caleb, who at eighty-five was described as following the Lord God of Israel “wholeheartedly.”

MacDonald started looking around for other older men who were at their very best in their twilight years. “One thing quickly became clear. I have known a lot of old men, but my list of ‘emulatable’ old men was alarmingly short.”

This was true for a variety of reasons. Some had drifted into self-centeredness, while others had become impatient and cynical toward the next generation. Some had let the later years sour them into becoming grumpy and critical. Many simply lived in the past and were no longer leaning forward into the future.

Securing a spot on MacDonald’s list of “emulatable” old men had virtually nothing to do with achievement or success as we often define it. It had more to do with character and attitude and “being.”

Having served in ministry more than three decades, I find myself less enamored with accomplishment and the bravado that often accompanies it. I am more drawn to men and women who live well than to those who live big. But those who’ve been in ministry a long time and are living well aren’t that easy to find. Why aren’t there more whose twilight years are their highlight years?

I think Henri Nouwen gives us a clue.
I began to experience a deep inner threat. As I entered into my fifties and was able to realize the unlikelihood of doubling my years, I came face to face with the simple question, “Did becoming older bring me closer to Jesus?” After twenty-five years of priesthood, I found myself praying poorly, living somewhat isolated from other people, and very much preoccupied with burning issues.
Pastors write thousands of sermons, lead thousands of meetings, and prepare thousands of budgets. (or at least it seems like it). Twenty or twenty-five years of pushing and striving and leading take its toll. We can feel drained, fatigued, and even jaded. The thought of one more vision message or capital campaign just doesn’t crank up the adrenaline like it once did.

At this point in life we’re very capable of leading out of our experience and knowledge rather than the deep well of a healthy soul. On the outside we have the answers, but on the inside we have questions. To further complicate matters, our physical stamina begins to diminish.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying passion for ministry goes away. I am saying it feels different than when you first started. As a twenty-five-year veteran, you face a whole new set of challenges. The triple-A of adrenaline, ambition, and achievement aren’t enough to sustain you anymore.

Like Nouwen, we have to admit that decades of ministry haven’t necessarily made us more like Jesus. Our sermons are better, our leadership is better, our staff management is better, our planning is better, but our intimacy with Jesus? Not so much.

And for some of us, there is the disillusionment that ministry hasn’t turned out like we thought it would. We’ve done the best we could, but more often than we want to admit, ministry has been more babysitting than leading, more mundane than miraculous, more life-taking than life-giving.

Some days we want out. We daydream about what it’s like on the outside. We fantasize about a prison break from the constraints of ministry. We wonder what it would be like to have a “normal” life. We ponder how it would feel to have weekends off. We dream of not being constantly scrutinized.

If ministry hasn’t turned out like you expected, I want to ask you the same question that Gordon MacDonald asked. What kind of old man or woman do you want to be? I’m not asking what kind of ministry you want to have. I’m asking about you, as a person, as a Christ follower. You can’t undo the past, and you can’t control all of your circumstances, but you so have a choice about the life you are going to live.
?
We have a gut-wrenching choice to make. We can put our ministry on autopilot and move into image-management mode. Or we can do the hard work of reinventing ourselves, of reworking the last chapters of life. If you have been drinking at the well of ambition and success and drivenness . . . that well will run dry. It’s time to drill a new well that will sustain you as you get older.