Word of Salvation – Vol. 36 No. 10 – March 1991

 

Christ Is All (2)

 

Sermon by Rev. A. Esselbrugge on Colossians 3:11

Reading: Colossians 3:1-17

 

Brothers and sisters, young people, boys and girls,

I want to tell a story.  It illustrates the change that comes over a person when the Lord calls them, re-creates them, and incorporates them into His eternal family.

The story is about an old prickly bush, a wild and ugly thing, a briar.  This old briar was growing in a ditch.

A gardener came along with a spade, dug around it and lifted it out.

‘What is he doing this for?  Doesn’t he know that I am an old worthless briar, ‘said the prickly bush to itself.

The gardener took that bush, and put it in his garden, ‘what a mistake he has made – planting an old briar like myself among such roses!’

But that gardener came once more and with his sharp knife made a slit in the briar and ‘budded’ it with a rose; and when summer came, lovely roses were blooming on the briar.  Then the gardener said, ‘Your beauty is not due to what came out of you, but what I put into you.’

That’s what God does with us, when we truly repent of our failures and mistakes and sins and give ourselves over into Him and His care.

Now, when you look at that briar, when it is in bloom with the grafted roses, you won’t see an ugly thorn bush, you won’t know where it came from or what it once was.  All you will see are the beautifully formed flowers and smell their wonderful fragrance.  You’ll never know by looking at it, that it once grew in a damp and dirty ditch.

And the apostle in our verse says of Christians, all you will see of them is Christ, nothing else.  And people, this is what must be true of us, true of all those who call themselves Christian.  Christ, as the all- sufficient Lord and Saviour, is all that matters.

His Spirit dwells in all believers regardless of racial-religious, cultural or social background.  ‘Here’ they are re-created and being renewed in gradual perfection for full knowledge according to the image of Him who created them.  This is the new person.  They are themselves entirely involved in Christ.  They can’t get enough of Him or spend enough time with Him.  Everything about them and in them, everything and in every way is Christ!  This is the new person in Christ.

Is this true of you?  As you sit and listen to the Word of God can you say ‘for me, Christ is all.  Beyond Him, there is nothing I desire.  He is my all.  With Him I am full and entirely satisfied.  My only longing is to have more of Him’?  Can you say that?  This isn’t just some cold and comfortless piece of rhetoric.  There is such depth and emotion in this, that words can hardly express the fullness of Christ as ALL.

You may have the greatest doctrines worked out and learned in your mind.  You may have great skill in learning in all kinds of fields of knowledge and still have no heat or passion in your religion.

I want to try and show you what must be true about a person, before they can say Christ is ALL for them.  This is what is needed more than anything else in our congregation.  We don’t need more learning.  We don’t need greater singing or exactness in worship.  Before we will have a real sense of unity among us, before we can be a caring body of people, we must know what it means to be able to say Christ is ALL for me!

Now where there is little sense of the veil of sin, little love to God and heavenly mindedness, and holiness of life there is no way we can cry together: ‘Christ is ALL and in all.’

The very theme of this letter of the apostle Paul to the Colossians is Christ.  Christ the Pre-eminent One, the Only One… the Only ALL Sufficient Saviour.  Do you know Him?

It’s not my business as a preacher to cause you to be reborn into the Lord.  Only God can do that.  The giving of new life to the spiritually dead is solely the act of the Spirit of God.  But it is my God-given business to persuade you of how empty a person is without Christ, and how great our need is of Him.  Now a conviction of sin and our emptiness won’t savingly separate us from sin.  But it will bring those who are destined for salvation to acknowledge their need of mercy.

The question we are raising here then is: how do I come to Christ?  How can I finally say, Christ is ALL for me?

Let us be clear first of all, about who this Christ is.  Follow me in your Bibles, and turn with me to the first chapter of this letter.

Look at verse 13 [read vss.13-23].

Go to chapter 2 and look at verse 9 [read vss.9-15].

This then, is the Christ we are to know, love and enjoy, and be totally caught up by.

How does a person come to know this Christ, who makes alive, forgives all sins, and removes a person out of the old world of darkness and plants them into the new world of light and joy and serenity?

I could command you here in the words of Scripture with God’s own command, ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ!’  But that won’t help you much.  That’s what we must do but something else is needed first to make that command relevant.

Before a person will go and find a cure for an illness, they will need to know they are sick in the first place.  Before you will seek a pardon for your crimes, you must be in prison first.  Before we can command each other to believe on Jesus Christ, we must feel ourselves in misery, we must be tired of our wicked ways.  Only then will we begin to turn to Jesus Christ for refreshing.  We must be conscious of our spiritual poverty, of our enslavement to the devil, before we will look for the Christ who can supply all our needs and be our ALL.  We must be cast down, confounded, condemned, a castaway, and lost in ourselves before we will look for a Saviour.

It is only as the Holy Spirit applies the truth of God’s laws into our conscience that we become aware of how proud we are, and how we will be called to account for every sin we have ever committed.  Don’t ever think you can hide from God.  He sees us when we do wrong.  He hears every word we speak, and even hears the thoughts of our minds.  And for every wrong act, and word and thought, He will judge us.  And His anger against us will be a raging fire unless we come into the saving grace of His Son Jesus.

Let me try and be specific here.  Our verse suggests some specific matters.  If we let the Spirit of God instruct our consciences, we will see we are in great need of cleansing.

That there are divisions and distinctions among us, between the English born and Dutch born cannot be denied.

Here where Christ is preached week after week, where the love of God is proclaimed, where Christ ought to be the centre and core of all our acts and thoughts, but isn’t, the Almighty asks, ‘Why have you not taken Me at My Word?  You have lowered Me into the dust with these prejudices.  You are lukewarm in your joy and determination to be My people.  You have gone off the boil and are rapidly cooling in your worship and living for Me.  Look out, or I will spit you out as an unpleasant thing.

People, as we examine these things and as we place our lives under the scrutiny of the Lord’s all-seeing eye, is there anyone who does not need to confess, ‘I have sinned Father, against heaven and against you.  I am not worthy to be called your child.’

We must bring our sins into focus.  Stop covering them over with stained bandages saying ‘Peace, peace’ when there is not peace.

We must face the majesty of God.  We must know what a dreadful thing it is to lie outside of Christ.  We must know that unless Christ is our ALL, we are in danger of dropping into hell at any moment.  We must escape for our lives and flee the wrath that will surely come on us if we don’t put aside the old nature and fly to Christ.

People it is time, it is past time to wake up from the sleep of death and see where our sin will lead us, and where our coldness of hearts will leave us.

Christ is to be our ALL in ALL.

Everything, says Paul, and he means absolutely everything, is to be Christ to us.  Whatever falls outside of Him has no existence.  For the new person, Christ is everything in all and every way.  Anything else is nothing in religion.

This whole letter to the Colossian Christians is based on this great all-encompassing theme.  There are those who go about saying, believe on the Lord Jesus, and make sure you do certain other things, to make your religion what it ought to be.  Follow the Christian calendar for example, and by following these ‘laws’ you will be safe from what devils can do to you.  Paul explodes this perverted idea of Christianity.  The things that are dangerous are the old ways and Paul says, avoid them!  They hurt the new person.  They militate against Christ.  Dump those superstitions.

For all of us, Christ is to be the ALL in ALL ways.

He is all our culture.

He is all our revelation, the key to opening the glorious riches of the scriptures.

He is all our ritual.  We don’t have circumcision, or seven sacraments, or candles or rich robes, but Christ is our ritual.

Christ is our tradition.  He’s more to us than the freshest ideas we may dream up.  He is our victory secure, and our liberty from the enslavement of the devil and his helpers, from the deceit and lies of the old world.

Christ is all as our Master and friend.

Christ is all in all!

And people, that brings us again to the question raised earlier: Are you there, where Christ is?

Is Christ so great to us, that He is our all?

Is He then, all our hope, our assurance, our joy, our aim, our strength, our wisdom, our all in all?

If He is… then are we living in all for Him?

Are we doing all for Him, because He is all to us?

Genuine unity among us, as a family of Christian brothers and sisters will only come when this is true of us.

AMEN