Dr. Scott McKee: Good morning, everybody. Good morning. We just launched a brand new series of the New Testament book of Colossians and last Sunday on Apocalypse Sunday, I gave an overview of the book of Colossians and today we dive into chapter one. I'm gonna encourage you to pick up a guidebook available for sale today at the media center right next to the Renew Cafe. They're also available at Farmington Hills as well.
$10 for a copy and they have daily devotions as well as a weekly discussion guide. I think it'll be very helpful to you as we work our way through this great New Testament letter. We're calling the series Walk This Way because Colossians is all about the ability to turn and walk a different direction in Jesus. Last week, we gave out footsteps, sticker footsteps and asked you to write down what your next step might be with Jesus and those footsteps line now the sanctuary here in Northville. They're on display in Farmington Hills as well.
Let's dive in. You heard it read chapter one. Paul begins with Thanksgiving. We always thank god, the father of our lord Jesus Christ. We pray for you because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love you have for all god's people.
The faith and love that spring from the hope stored up for you in heaven and about which you have already heard in the true message of the gospel that has come to you. Paul begins his letter with gratefulness and he's grateful for the same things we're grateful for around here. Again, he's not been to the church at Colossae but he heard that they're putting their faith in Jesus Christ. Now, these these Colossian people were originally pagan Greeks but he's heard that they're putting their their faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ. He's grateful for that.
He's grateful for this church he's not been to yet. He's heard they're they're they're turning from their sin. They're placing faith in Jesus. They're walking on the right path. So, and he's filled with gratefulness.
He says, I'm grateful for the faith you have in Jesus and for the love you have for one another. He's grateful for the love they have for one another. And again, he's grateful for the things we're grateful for around here. These strangers are becoming friends, people who used to clutch their resources are becoming generous, people who used to be divided are coming together, dividing walls are breaking down, and they're becoming a true community. And Paul uses this great trinity that's often used in the the New Testament.
He frames his comments through faith, love, and hope. You see these three words together often in the New Testament, faith, love, and hope. He says, we've heard of your faith in Jesus Christ and your love for each other. Now, notice the next phrase, the faith and love that spring from the hope stored up for you in heaven. In other words, hope is the foundation.
It springs from hope. Hope is what enables you to have faith when it's difficult. Hope is what enables you to love each other when it's challenging. The faith and love he writes that spring from the hope stored up for you in heaven and is about which you have already heard the true message of the gospel that has come to you. Hope flows out of the gospel, Paul says.
And then Paul tells the Colossians he's been praying for them, and it's a beautiful prayer, one that we can model for each other. We can pray this prayer of the apostle Paul for each other, Colossians one nine to 10. For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we've not stopped praying for you. Continually ask god to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and the understanding the spirit gives so that you may live a life worthy of the lord and please him in every way bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of god. What a great prayer we can pray for each other.
That you might live worthy of the lord and please him in every way. He concludes his prayer for he has rescued you from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the son he loves in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. There was a custom in ancient days when one nation defeated another, they would bring that population into their nation. They would be brought into the nation, and Paul says, here, for he's rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the son he loves. We've been brought into the kingdom of the son and this is springing from the hope of the gospel.
So let's talk today about hope. That's our theme. I had this chest moved here this morning from my home, and I hope Angie doesn't find out. This sits under the bedroom window in our master bedroom and stores Angie's sweaters. It's a very nice chest.
It's got a lock on it, just to show you how valuable those sweaters must be. It's lined with cedar, I think it's cherry on the outside. But this chest had a different purpose at one time. When Angie was 17 years old, her mother gave her this chest as a place to put important things to anticipate the future, to look forward to a time where she might be married herself and have a family of her own. And she said she put Tupperware in this box.
She had some linens in this box. I hope just I I think these aren't very much done today, but everybody knows, I think I was giving away what these boxes are called. Hope chest. Hope chest. I don't think it's practiced widely today, but there was a time when was very common for young women to have a chest like this in which they anticipated their future life.
They put their expressions of their longings and dreams in a box like this. Again, they're not too common anymore, I think partly because society has realized that it was probably foolhardy to put all our hopes and dreams on the finding of a man. And that as great as men are, and believe me, I'm all for them, I'm a big fan, but the idea of putting hopes and dreams on men is probably misplaced. Some of you may have experienced this personally. Ladies, you may have had a hope not chest.
Boy, I sure hope not. But people are hopers. We all have a place where we store our deepest longings and our fondest desires. Human beings are irrepressible hopers. We hope.
So I want to look today at why hope is so important and ask, what are you putting your hope in, and how do you cling to hope? How important is hope? Why don't we put our hope in, and how do we cling to hope? People are hopers. Hope is why people get married.
Hope is why people have children. It's why people pay money to send those children off to college. Hope is why people buy ab machines. It's why people play the stock market. It's why people read self help books and see therapists.
We are hopers by nature. It's the reason we read the bible. It's the reason we're here today. The question is, where do you place your hope? Because we all have a box like this.
We all have a place where we put our hopes. The Bible has this to say about hope. Hope deferred makes the heart sick because the human spirit can endure and survive a great deal, but it cannot endure the loss of hope. That's the end. I read this week about experiments that were done in a Nazi concentration camp that had to do with this hopeless factor.
In one of the Nazi concentration camps, they would put some of the victims and have them move a dirt pile from this side of the camp to that side of the camp. They moved the same dirt pile from here to there, moved the same dirt pile here, so it became real obvious this was meaningless work. What they found was people engaged in meaningless work actually died sooner than those subjected to normal, harsh conditions of the camp. But the human spirit cannot live without hope. Hope deferred makes the heart sick.
So what are you putting your ultimate hopes in? Because we all have, again, we all have one of these boxes. Paul wrote to another church, the church of Rome, and he said, We know that suffering produces perseverance perseverance character and character hope. And hope does not put us to shame because God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. Hope and perseverance go together.
Whenever we talk about hope, we're talking generally about a situation in which we have to persevere. The difficulty is clinging to hope in times of disappointment, in times of discouragement, and that's what we're talking about primarily today. Paul again wrote to the church of Rome. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth or at the present time. All of creation, not just not just humans, but all of creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth.
How intense are the pains of childbirth? I don't know, but I have it based on observation and firsthand authority that it's very intense. And this says, creation has been in the pains of childbirth since creation to the present time. Thousands and thousands and thousands of years. Imagine being in the pains of childbirth for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.
Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the spirit. In other words, not just creation and not just things that are anti God, but those of us who are in Christ, those of us connected to God, those who have the first fruits of the spirit. We also groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption, to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. Someday, we're going to experience the redemption of our bodies. Redemption means to exchange.
And I'm kind of looking forward to the day I get to exchange this body for a different one, we all will experience that. For in this hope, we are saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.
Hope is always about the future, it's about things we don't yet have. See, hope always takes place in the face of groaning, disappointment, and pain. Therefore, hope always expresses itself in perseverance. So the choice to cling to the hope of the gospel is the choice to persevere. Why does Charlie Brown keep pitching every time spring runs around?
Because he's got hope. Why does the character George on Seinfeld keep asking girls out on dates? He's got hope. Why do thousands of people show up at Ford Field to watch the lions play? I don't know.
Paul writes to the church at Thessalonica, but since we belong to the day, let us be sober, putting on faith and love as a breastplate and the hope of salvation as a helmet. Here we see the great triad again, faith, love, and hope. Put on faith and love as a breastplate and the hope of salvation as a helmet. How important is a helmet to a football player? Very important.
How important is hope to the human spirit? Critically important. And this says you can put it on. Put on hope. You can put hope on.
You can choose hope or you can choose hopelessness. You can decide to be a hopeful or a hopeless person. A lot of research has been done on this, principally by a guy named Martin Seligman, some of his associates over the last three decades. I want take a few moments to describe some of the research and then tie that back to what Paul is saying here. There was an experiment done decades ago with dogs, what it means to learn to be hopeful or to be hopeless.
They put dogs into a cage that had a shock floor. In one of the cages, the dogs had a button they could push that would stop the shocks. Those dogs learned to do that, and they would stop the jumping. The second cage had the same shock floor, but there was no button to turn it off. There was no way dogs could stop.
After a while, they stopped jumping around, and those dogs just laid down. They just gave up. They just gave in to hopelessness. Then they put those same dogs in a third type of cage where half the floor was shocked, half the floor was not, and there was a barrier the dogs could easily jump over, and they put the dogs on the shock side. What they found was the dogs who had the button in the earlier cage, they could turn it off, all jumped the barrier and went to the non shock side.
The dogs who had no such button to turn it off, they never jumped, they just laid down. They assumed hope was not possible. Researchers called this a learned helplessness. It's possible to learn helplessness. Some of you right now, you're mad at the researchers for hurting the dogs.
You want to put the researchers in those cages and take that buddy. Underneath the quitting, the failure was this loss of hope. Hope deferred makes the heart sick. Some of you are in a situation right now where it involves your health or a dream that you've had or a certain pain that you're in, and the question is, will you persevere? Will you keep following Christ or will you just give up?
Now, what's interesting is they did more research on the kinds of people who are likely to lose hope, and they discovered it has to do with the way people think. People that are hopeful people and people that are kind of hopeless have really different patterns of thought. The key is how do you understand and explain your failures, setbacks, criticisms or bad events? And there's a way of thinking that leads to hope, and there's a way of thinking that leads to hopelessness. Was thinking about this, there's a character in Winnie the Pooh I don't know if you remember that show Winnie the Pooh but there is a character in Winnie the Pooh that is kind of a hopeless character.
Anybody know what I'm talking about? Eeyore. Eeyore is a hopeless character. Why bother? Now this might be what's called Eeyore Syndrome.
It's a way of thinking that produces this why bother sort of attitude. It has to do with how you understand and think about your setbacks and your failures. People who give up easily, who do not persevere, tend to say this about their problems, their failures and their misfortunes: Number one, they feel it's going to last forever, that the situation is permanent. Number two, they feel it affects all of their life, that is, it is pervasive, that it affects not just this one area, but every area of their life. And the third thing they tend to say is that it's personal.
It's all because of me, it's all my fault. This is not about healthily taking responsibility for something, but just a negative, it's all about me, and I'm never going to succeed. And I want think through these three areas, and then we'll come back to wrap it up with the Apostle Paul. Do you ever find yourself thinking this is going to be a permanent situation? For example, let's say you try to lead a small group and it does not go well.
Do you think, I'm just not a good small group leader. That's forever true. I can't lead a small group. But there's a variety of alternate explanations that could be equally valid. Maybe you had an off night, maybe the group had an off night, maybe the group is just cranky, so small groups get cranky.
It could be a temporary thing. Maybe I needed to learn some skills in leading a small group. Permanence is the first deal. The second one is if I experience a setback or a failure, it's pervasive. It's going to affect every other situation.
So, for example, let's say you ask somebody out on a date and you get turned out. Anybody ever get turned out on a date? Somebody got to think back a really long time. Either that or this is the most successful dating group in the history of the world. You get turned down for a date, you can think, nobody nobody is attracted to me.
Nobody likes me. I will never have a spouse. I'll never get married. Nobody likes me. Again, there's alternate possibilities.
Maybe this particular person doesn't like me. Maybe there's no chemistry between these two individuals. Maybe she really did have to wash her hair that night. There could be all kinds of explanations for that. Permanent, pervasive, and then personal.
It's all my fault. It's all the result of my inadequacy. There's an interesting example of this in the book of Numbers in the Old Testament. Numbers 13, Moses sends 12 spies into the promised land. Remember this story?
The promised land has been promised to them by God and God says, look, it's in your box. It's in your bag. I've given you this land. This land is yours. I've set it all up.
It's yours for the taking. You just got to go in and claim the land. Moses sends 12 spies in. The spies come back with very different reports. Two of the spies, Caleb and Joshua, say, We've got to go there, the land is fantastic, and we can take it, and if they're ours for the taking, God has set it all up.
Let's go. 10 of the spies come back, however, and say, It's true, the land is fantastic, it's a lot of milk and honey, but the obstacles there are too great. When it actually says, we look like grasshoppers in their eyes. A little exaggeration going on there. And this way of thinking kind of spreads until Numbers fourteen:two it says, All the children of Israel said, 'If only we died in Egypt, if only we died in the wilderness.' This kind of hopelessness, they just lay down.
What's the use? Why bother? It's like a whole nation of eeyores. Here's God trying to give them the promised land with milk and honey. Winnie the pooh would have loved that?
But it's like they've got a whole nation of eeyores. What's the use? Too bad we didn't die in Egypt. Too bad we didn't die in the wilderness. They are living the same set of circumstances.
It's not the circumstances that determine their response. Two of them say we are going cling to the hope that God has given us. And 10 of them say there is too much risk, too much challenge, we've got to turn back. So you recall not just a just a hope, not just a optimism, not just a thinking I'm clever and bright and strong and capable, it's none of that kind of stuff. Paul's hope is in the gospel.
And now that lays out some parameters. Instead of Paul saying my problems are permanent, Paul says Christ is eternal. Christ is eternal. Therefore, problems are temporary. Christ is everywhere.
Therefore, problems are limited. Christ is in me. Therefore, I am not alone. Therefore, I can persevere. What's eternal in this world?
Jesus is eternal, and that means my problems are temporary. He's got this wonderful statement in his letter to the church at Corinth where he talks about his old sufferings. The apostle Paul says, my sufferings are light and momentary. Light and momentary. Quite a statement for a guy who gets whipped, beaten, stoned, imprisoned, and ultimately murdered.
Light and momentary? Well, because of the gospel, because Jesus Christ is permanent, therefore, your problems are temporary. Every problem we have is temporary. Paul said our hope is laid up in heaven, Colossians one five. It's eternal.
Therefore, even terminal illness is temporary. Thoughts of that this week just lifted my soul. Christ is eternal, so every problem is in the non eternal category. Another thing in Paul is my Christ is universal. There's no place Paul is going to go where Jesus is not.
Therefore, Paul says, my problems are limited. They're not the whole story of this world. They're not everywhere. Then Paul comes to these problems that have his own flaws and his own shortcomings. The hope that is ours is Christ in you.
Christ in you, the hope of glory, Paul says. Christ is in you, therefore you are not alone. Therefore, my inadequacy, which I know is great, is not the final truth about me. Why not? Because Christ is in me.
See, if we are going to be people of hope, people that persevere, we need to learn to live this way. Let's look at that again. Would you read these words with me aloud? Christ is eternal, therefore problems are temporary. Christ is everywhere, therefore problems are limited.
Christ is in me, therefore I am not alone, therefore I can persevere. When I think in ways that lead to perseverance, tenacity, faithfulness in life, I am practicing Christian hope. And when I think in ways that lead to discouragement, defeat, and despair, I need the grace of God to change the way that I think. So I'll just close by asking you, have you put your hope in the right box, and are you clinging to it? Some of you have hopes for relationships that are not being fulfilled in this life, and you're tempted to stop persevering.
Maybe you want to be married, and it hasn't happened yet, and you're tempted to hook up with the wrong person, or to allow sinful patterns to go on in a relationship because you're afraid of being alone. Maybe you're in a marriage that's not all you hope to be, and you're tempted to give up on your spouse. Some of you had dreams for accomplishments that have not been fulfilled in this lifetime, and you're tempted to give in to envy, or to competing with other people, comparing yourself to other people, or you're tempted to become a workaholic and cheat your family? Will you say, I'm going put my hopes and dreams in this box, and I'm going to give them all to God? I'm going say, God, you know all my hopes and dreams already.
That you know, that I know, some of those hopes and dreams will be achieved in this lifetime, and some of them will not be achieved until I'm with you in glory. But God, I'm putting all of my hopes in you. We are people of hope. I hope you put your hope in the right box because Paul says there is stored up for you an inheritance of the saints beyond your wildest dreams if you just hold fast to the hope of the gospel. Will you pray with me?
Oh God of all hope, you are eternal and ever present. You make it possible to look forward to the future. Help us to place our hope in the right place and to cling to hope in all circumstances. This we pray through Christ our Lord. Amen.