lift our hearts, our vision is up to our
relationship with Jesus Christ our Lord.
We're going to start with a prayer and Kirk
Castleman from Houston is going to lead that
prayer. He's a young student. Kirk, thank you
for leading the prayer.
Because of Jesus and because of his sacrifice
for us, we can open our hearts and praise you
and adore you if you like us.
We are amazed that people like us, little
pieces of darkness, are loved by you, honored
by you, and precious in your sight.
And talk to the creator of the universe freely
and openly. We can say what's on our hearts and
so today will come.
Not because of what we have done, we haven't
done anything, but because of what we have done.
We want to just thank you and praise you and
tell you how much we want to try to love you
and serve you.
And that you would give us a task that you
don't even need us to do.
There's nothing about anything that we've ever
done or preached or said that you couldn't do
better without us.
But you invite us and very commend us to do
something that we really cannot do today is to
watch people become Christians and develop in a
four year.
We pray, Father, that we will never do anything
that would stand in the way of that.
We ask your forgiveness today. We are people
who have questions and doubts and duplicities
in our own hearts even this day.
And we thank you for calm and for the
willingness that he has to use the magnificent
gifts that he has.
We lay them on the altar for you and then share
them with other people.
What a blessing it has been to all of us. We
thank you. We pray that his work and his life
will continue.
For your glory as many days as you want it to.
What a joy.
To be around a person who is so multi-talented
that you can say beautiful things about me.
It's just wonderful to think.
Today, Father, we lift up this lectureship and
we lift up every participant and every
contributor to this lectureship.
We pray that they will have a safe journey home
whether it means today or tomorrow.
We pray that the effects of this lectureship
will be for eternity according to your will.
We pray for those who are sick.
I want to pray in our special way for our son
and our grandson who is yet to be born.
There are no patients.
We ask that you bless them this day and so on.
Thank you for your love and your grace. Help us
to listen to Jesus' name.
Amen. Thank you, Kurt.
I've suggested that Paul in Colossians is
calling for a continuation of the teaching of Christ.
But Paul is concerned not just with the idea
that one has Christ central in focus
and that one says the right things about the
death, burial, and resurrection of the Lord.
He believes that there are strong implications
from who Jesus is in the teaching for the life
of each one, each of us here today.
I propose that in this language, rather common
stereotypical in our time, raising the bar high,
that Paul raises the bar all the way to the top.
I was here at ACU in the heyday of the great
pole vaulters, Billy Olson, who was in the Olympics,
and Billy would put the bar about 21 feet.
That's pretty far up there.
For me, even at that age, if I could have put
it at 8 feet, that probably would have been good.
So Paul lifts the bar up.
We are to set our eyes on Christ on the right
hand of God.
So he puts the bar all the way to the top is
one way to put this.
Now scholars talk about paronesis.
You don't need to have heard that word or
worried about it.
It's a good Greek word.
It means the living out or the application of
fundamental kind of teachings.
And we begin these in Colossians in Chapter 3.
Continuation then is more than just right thinking.
It's right living.
It's relating to other people in the right kind
of way.
And we'll see how Paul sets this out.
So what are the ramifications of the Christ
whose blood reconcile not only humans,
but everything in the universe to God?
What are the implications?
Are we a different people as we go out this
morning having listened to Paul
where he sets the bar so that we have our eyes
on Christ and God?
We are God's people.
So the sites of the believer are to be lifted
all the way to Christ at the right hand of God.
Nothing stands between the believer and God.
As I told you, I've been off in Russia teaching
church history.
I first taught biblical theology to nine Russians,
most of them with degrees at sort of graduate work.
A new school being started, David Burley out of
Austin is particularly behind this.
So in talking about church history for 2,000 years,
there develops in Christianity the idea that we
don't stand face to face before God
without persons at various levels in the church
mediating for us.
Paul's vision is, though, that all the way to
God we can lift our sights.
We aren't dependent upon intermediaries of
humans that will enable us to see the Lord our God.
Now, number two, I'd like to give emphasis to
the fact that just as the blood of Christ
happened at a specific time and in a concrete place,
according to God's schedule of the end things
or eschatology,
so in our life how we respond to the crucified
and resurrected Lord
is to be concrete each day in our life.
What we do, we continually look to him,
and we are changed into his image from moment
to moment, according to Paul in 2 Corinthians.
So this is the great text we have before us
that suggests where we are to set our sights.
We're going to read the text under consideration,
and Jerry Luker from Mesquite is going to read this,
and he'll keep reading, and you can read along
with him.
Since then you have been raised with Christ.
Set your hearts on things above where Christ is
seated at the right hand of God.
Set your minds on things above, not on earth,
for you died.
And your life is now hidden with Christ in God.
When Christ, who is your life, appears, then
you also will appear with him in glory.
Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to
your earthly nature,
sexual immorality and impurity, lust, evil,
desires, and greed, which is idolatry.
Because of these, the wrath of God is coming.
You used to walk in these ways in the life you
once lived,
but now you must rid yourselves of all such
things as these,
anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy
language on your lips.
Do not lie to each other, since you have taken
off your old self with its practices
and put on the new self, which is being renewed
in knowledge in the image of its creator.
Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or
uncircumcised, barbaric, sentient, slave, or freak,
but Christ is all and is in all.
Therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and
dearly loved,
both yourself with compassion, kindness,
humility, gentleness, and patience,
bear with each other and forgive whatever
grievances you may have against one another.
Forgive as the Lord forgave you, and over all
these virtues put on love,
which binds them all together in perfect unity.
Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts,
since its members are one body,
you are called to peace.
And be thankful that the word of Christ dwells
in you richly as you teach and admonish one another
with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns,
and spiritual psalms,
give it in your hearts to God.
And whatever you do, whether in word or deed,
do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus,
giving thanks to God the Father through him.
All right, thank you very much, Jerry.
Let's go now and take up these parts individually.
You have been raised with Christ, Paul says,
and so your life then is to reflect the risen
nature that's even Christ's nature.
The believer is able to lift because the
baggage, the weight, has been removed,
and that's how one can rise in life, can be
lifted up to share the goodness and the love of God.
This is signified in our baptism. Our sins are
voiced away when we are buried with our Lord.
In Romans 6, Paul says, we rise to walk in
newness of life.
We are a new kind of people then. The weights
have been lifted.
What if Billy Olsen were to try that with
10-pound weights on each leg?
That would be impossible. Even he probably
could only do 11 feet with those kind of weights.
So Christ enabled us to put the weights aside,
to be free, to look to God,
to not carry around all the sins and all the
problems of our past.
Now, unfortunately, they keep creeping back, I
think, and we have our problems.
But if we keep looking to Him, if we have a
prayer life, and if we constantly live in Him,
then we are freed from all the weights that
hold us down.
We have left behind not only the human forces
that keep us from being fully God's people,
but if there are those hiding behind trees or
wherever they are, the demonic in this world,
even those do not prevent us from lifting our
eyes to God
and having a life that is suitable and holy
before Him,
released in His service to be His kind of people.
All right, so we set our minds on things that
are above.
I think that we do have some problem of where
we set our sights each day.
I try to get quite a lot done. My wife said I'm
doing more now than when I was retired.
I've done a lot of publications since I retired.
I was freed to do it.
I didn't have to go to committees. I don't
volunteer for committees anymore.
I did enough in 50 years of college teaching to
fulfill more than a lifetime.
So freed from that, there's all kinds of things
to do.
But sometimes problems happen. We live in a
house that's an electronic nightmare.
It was designed by an electronic engineer, and
there's a button for about everything.
It took us a year to figure out what all these
buttons are for.
And things happen, and sometimes one gets
weighed down in immediate kind of problems,
and one gets caught up in this or that.
So all of us are dragged down many times.
Daily I try to think, why am I weighed down
with all this?
I don't need to worry so much because I've been released.
I need to keep lifting my eyes to look at the top.
So Paul says we are broken loose from fleshly things.
He says, verse 3, you have died, and your life
is hidden with Christ and God.
I like that phrase very much, our life is hidden.
Our life has to be transparent to our family
and our wife
and the people we associate with.
But if we're really walking with Christ in the
transparency of our life,
what do they see? They see the Lord Christ
living in us.
They see us as someone who's trying to live his
life and fulfill his works.
So you are hidden in the heavenly Christ.
And if we could just realize this daily as we
think about our life before God.
Then I like this phrase, that when he appears,
then you will be revealed in glory.
I think I talked about this the first time, but
I'll repeat this,
that we have these old great stories about how
we'll go to the gate one at a time and pass Peter.
I guess I'll give you my favorite story about this.
The story is that there's this long line
waiting at the gate.
They're standing quite far back in the line, a
New York City taxi driver by the name of Joe Consiglieri.
And St. Peter sees Joe way off and he yells out,
Joe Consiglieri, a New York City taxi driver.
And Joe comes on up to the gate and St. Peter
says to him,
I have this beautiful three-bedroom apartment
for you, Joe, and here's a silk robe for you to wear.
Now standing in the line is Joe Smith, and he's
been a gospel preacher all his life.
Forty years he's preached the gospel.
Joe can't wait till he gets up because
obviously he's going to do better than a New
York City cab driver.
And so he finally comes up to St. Peter and St.
Peter says,
oh, yes, Joe Smith, I have a two-bedroom
apartment for you and here's a cotton robe to wear.
And Joe says, what do you mean? I've given my
life to preaching the gospel. Is this all I get?
And Peter said, well, up here we go by results.
When you preach, they sleep. When Joe drives,
they pray.
So you know good stories about going through.
Paul says that when we go, we're going to be
revealed with him.
And I gave you this little story in 1984, my
wife and I went around the world
and one of the places we went, we landed in
Shanghai in China.
We went on to Moscow and St. Petersburg. That
was the first time I just got back from there.
The first time we were there was 21 years ago.
When we went into China, the only place this
has ever happened, we were with a tour group
and the tour people took up all our passports,
all our declarations of what we had.
And ahead of time, they gave it to the Chinese
officials and they checked all these out.
And we never stood in line. We just went right by.
All of us, the passport controls, the baggage
controls, we were all in.
We all went in with our tour guide.
So Jesus, Paul says, is the one who's going to
verify who we are and what we are.
And we aren't going through one by one, but
we're all going through with him.
So Paul says when Christ, who is your life, is revealed,
then you will also be revealed with him in glory.
So he's the one, since we are hidden with him,
we can go through all the security measures.
They got a lot of security hindrances in the
world today.
In Germany, they pat you down. We flew through Frankfurt.
St. Petersburg, they don't bother with you
much, interestingly, though you have to go
through the machines.
So when we go through with Christ, you see,
none of the machines will detect us,
would be one way of putting it, because Paul
says that you are hidden with Christ and God,
and you will be revealed with him in glory.
That's our future as we walk with him, as we
lift our eyes to the heights, to the bar where
he's taken us.
So we are hidden with Christ, a great thought
for today.
Now yesterday, I indicated how things always
show up in fives in Colossians,
and I said we restorationists should be able to
go with that,
because we have five steps of salvation and
five acts of worship, so we should like fives.
So all you preachers can preach great sermons
from this.
We have two sets of five sins and a set of five
as to what our life should really be.
And I think we need to stress more what our
life should be than to notice the negatives,
but those are items that need to be put aside.
When we look to Christ seated beside God,
we need to remember what he is rather than give
all the weight to the negatives.
But if you look here, we have five items, and
I'll now list them one at a time.
It's been pointed out by Lincoln that these are
not parts of the fleshly body.
Down through history, like the Manichaeans and
others are always trying to say
that sin is seated in the human body and the
flesh, and because of that we have these problems.
Notice that these vices aren't situated in the
human flesh as such,
but they are decisions that people make as to
how to lead their life.
So number one, there's fornication.
The Greek word includes adultery, I suppose
unmarrieds, and it includes with prostitutes.
That might be one of the focal points of this.
When one is buried with Christ, whatever one's
life was before,
all this is washed away so that one can in holy
love relate to people in the body and in the family.
Number two is impurity.
Impurity is also sexual sin.
In our time, perhaps pornography is a word we
could connect with it.
I am on the computer quite a lot trying to find
various kinds of things,
and as you may well know, you can accidentally,
without wishing, get into a pornographic site,
and it's a little hard to get rid of one of
those whenever you bring it up.
Maybe that's the reason some people are
tempted, I don't know,
but I hear various places, I was up in a
retreat in Wisconsin not long ago,
and a man was telling about a circle of friends
he was connected with in the upper Midwest,
and when they went around confessing, looking
at pornographic sites
was one of the sins of these people who profess
to announce Jesus as Lord.
It is, I presume, a great temptation,
but rather than having our eyes on the computer screen,
we are asked to lift them to Christ at the
right hand of God.
Then Paul talks about passion, and we can
presume this is uncontrolled sexual appetite.
One of the interesting things doing
particularly early church history is
that in our time everybody is trying to find medicines
and whatever you can find to enhance passions.
That's our age. Of course, that's been in other ages,
but think about the desert saints, as I call
them, in the 3rd and 4th centuries,
and many people were trying to avoid these
passions rather than to enhance them.
That shows how people live.
Antony goes way out in the desert, and people
keep falling, and he keeps going on.
I often told my sense enough, Ron remembers me
saying this,
that I like the ones who sat on pillars.
There's a man named Simon Styletes.
Styletes is the pillar, and they would go up there,
and Simon supposedly sat on a 100-foot pillar
for about 30 years.
He had a bit of space up there, had some kind
of a rope to pull up food and water,
but there he sat, fleeing the passions that are humans.
I don't know that Christ has called us to lift
ourselves up on a 100-foot pillar
to flee from all the temptations that surround us.
Nevertheless, we are called to move away.
Now, that wasn't, of course, just the
Christians doing that.
There was a lot of aestheticism out of Platonic
kind of thinking.
It was sort of in the air, so there's different
things in the air at different times.
Unfortunately, I think enhancing passion is the
sin of our age, if I could say that,
and can we lift our eyes in a different
direction to live right before God.
Then number five, this translation says greed,
which is also idolatry.
It's the desire to obtain successive items.
Now, I suppose if my wife and I haven't agreed,
it has to do with books.
We have about 10,000 books, and there's a
library in Michigan that would like to have
these books.
That is Rochester College, but there's another
college that would like to have them.
We have to decide what we're going to do with
them, because with our passion in life,
we need to continue it in our death, and we
need to make this available to people who can
also look into it.
There are a lot of them good commentaries on
biblical studies.
My wife collects somewhat different kind of books.
I suppose this could be greed if we just keep
stacking up the books.
We had all kinds of bookshelves made. We made a garage.
How do you store books like this? We have a 25
by 25 garage.
Our house had two garages like that. We made
one of them into our library and books,
and unfortunately, we don't have enough shelves
in there. The books keep coming.
So is that greed? Well, maybe it is.
There are a lot of things we can be greedy
about in life.
Some people do that with a bank account and
what have you.
But in God, we are to lift our sights, I hope,
not out of greed,
but we have good intent for these books to be
used by future generations
who are trying to study God's way and to lift
him up in their life.
So we are called then to turn from worshipping
the creature to the creator who is blessed forevermore.
We turn to the second set of fives. I'll go to
them one by one.
Number one is anger. I've sometimes had
problems with that.
I have a slow fuse, but once I get riled up
after a long feeling of being abused or something,
I've been known to flash out a bit, and I think
I've been able to conquer this down through the years.
I remember once when we lived in Dubuque, Iowa,
the university owned the house we lived in,
and they usually mowed the yard.
So one year they decided not to mow the yard,
and they didn't tell me.
So I didn't have a mower, and I went over and I
could borrow a mower,
but they only wanted to give me an old push mower.
And those old real push mowers, what can you do
with grass that's 12 inches high?
And he said, well, we can't loan you a power mower.
And I sort of blew my stack, I guess, and he
said, Tom, that's not characteristic of you.
And I said, you're quite right, but I'm afraid
I'm so upset that I don't know what to do about this.
I've tried to reduce the number of these kind
of responses.
We have these, and so what do we do about them?
Of course, the great wrath of our time, I
suppose, is road rage.
When we lived in LA, at one time people were
carrying pistols on the LA freeways,
as Ron knows, and they were shooting each other
through the car windows
over what they thought were infractions.
Once in a while I got caught in this.
Once I went up to Ojai, Ron, and I was coming
back down through Ventura
and Thousand Oaks to the Malibu campus, and on
the Malibu Canyon Road,
this guy kept cutting in and out, and you're
not supposed to do that.
The stripes are that you don't do this.
And he kept me from moving ahead two or three
times, and I was very upset about it.
And Lo and behold, he turned into the
Pepperdine campus.
So I went right up behind him, and I went up to
him, and I said,
did you know that what you were doing is illegal?
He had a girl in the car, I think was showing
off to her,
and he said to me, what's your problem?
And I said, I don't think I have a problem, you
have a problem.
Well, we talked a long time, and I went out and
I wrote down his license numbers
so he could see me, and he finally got off his
car and said,
what are you going to do?
And I said, I'm probably not going to do anything,
but you should know that I'm very upset.
Now, we can all get involved in road rage, I suspect,
but even that, I think, is a problem.
I've often said to my wife, who sometimes gets
upset by what other people do,
you know, this driving is a lot involved in it,
and when someone keeps you from going ahead,
maybe this keeps you out of an accident, who knows?
So I sort of learned to cool.
I remember one time we were going west across Vermont,
and I missed the entrance to a freeway, I guess
Dorothy usually drives,
and I figured out where she said go, and she
said we lost 15 minutes,
and I said, well, don't worry about it too much.
We got on down the interstate about 20 miles,
and there was an accident that had probably
happened 15 minutes before we arrived,
and there were several cars involved, and I
said to her,
look, you know, if we had made that turn,
we might be there with the rest of those
automobiles, so who knows?
So we can get too caught up, and these angers
we have,
rage, malice, intention to harm other people.
I've had people say to me that I've been
damaged by more members of the church than
anybody else,
and I thought about that a lot.
I've told people I've been invited to leave
Churches of Christ both by insiders and outsiders.
The outsiders want me to become a Presbyterian
or something,
and the insiders said you don't belong to us,
you don't believe the gospel.
So you have people with intentions, and they
try to harm and damage,
maybe sometimes justly, but what about malice
toward other people?
That can encircle our lives so much.
Slander trumped up charges.
I had a position once which I lost not because
of a man who said things about me that weren't
fully true.
There were other reasons, but that was used in justification.
Ten years later he apologized to me.
That was a Christian college.
He said that he should have never done that,
that he came to realize that the man he was
serving and doing this
also did things to other people that shouldn't
be done.
So I one time told people I've been done in by
fellow believers probably more than other people
because I associate with them,
but the one thing I discovered when I taught at
Penn State,
several of my friends were atheist prophets,
and I said I noticed there's a difference with
these people if they do you in.
I never got an apology from any of them.
They don't see that apologies is ever called for,
but sometimes fellow believers,
because of the tenderness of their heart when
it strikes them what they've done before God,
do come around and recognize that this is not
Christ-like in what they do.
So flee slander, abusive and foul language.
Put that out of your life so your sights can be
lifted to go with God and Jesus Christ.
So these are negatives that I suppose are even
below whatever height you put it,
and God will destroy those who are involved,
whose lives are not changed so that they
conform to that of Jesus Christ.
Believers that Paul is writing to were once
guilty of some of these I call five plus five,
those five negatives in each case,
and we are sometimes guilty of them.
Can we lift our sights to be with God and Christ?
We have been stripped of this evil because of
Christ's death on the cross.
We are freed to live in another way.
Our old self is gone.
We are new creatures in Christ Jesus.
Now Paul gives a few specifics beginning in
verse 11.
One is that because Christ has broken the
barriers that surround humans from one another,
that we should be able to greet each other, all
kinds of people in Christ Jesus regardless.
So he advances some of the main rifts in his
time as far as people were concerned,
Jew and Greek.
The Jews wouldn't, a true Jew wouldn't greet a
Greek with Shalom,
and maybe that continues.
There's an Old Testament scholar died recently
by the name of Cyrus Gordon.
He has published various things, and I was
asked to help him write an autobiography.
He lived in Brookline, Mass, not far from me,
and he had written it.
I did some editions and made some suggestions
about it,
and I got to know Cyrus pretty well, and I used
to greet him with Shalom,
and I noticed he never greeted me back.
I don't know that he's a very formal Jew, but
anyway, I guess that was inappropriate.
I don't know, so I quit saying Shalom.
So there are these barriers between individuals,
but Paul thinks that in Christ Jesus, in him,
these barriers are taken away.
He says they're circumcised and uncircumcised barbarians.
The Greeks called everybody.
They couldn't understand their language.
It sounded poetic.
That is, Baba, Baba, Ross, that sounds like
someone babbling.
In Russia, I rode in taxis and heard news on
the radio,
and I sort of got used to the cadences,
but it's still a lot of babbling to me generally.
I could pick up names occasionally.
So as Greeks heard any other people, they were babbling,
so they called them barbarians, and they didn't
hold these in too high regard.
Scythian slave and free, but in Christ Jesus,
those aren't our barriers today,
but we have enough barriers,
all that we could lift our eyes to Christ at
the right hand of God
and not have these prejudices and these
feelings about who to greet
and who not to greet.
All these people ought to be welcomed in Christ.
Now in Romans, Paul, now what is it, Galatians,
Paul says Jew and Greek, some scholars have
noted in Colossians,
it's Greek and Jew.
Why that?
Well, one suggestion is that these are
predominantly Greeks in this congregation,
and that's why the order may be reversed.
So for Paul, in Christ Jesus, if you have
raised the bar all the way to the top,
ethnicity no longer matters,
but in Christ Jesus, we are all one serving him.
Whether circumcised or not barbarians, slave or free,
we live in a reconciled world.
Remember that grand vision of Paul?
I think it's just difficult to really get the
full sense of what that means.
In a specific time in the bloodshed of Christ
on the cross,
everything is reconciled.
Humans are reconciled.
Even this physical universe, according to Paul
in Romans 8,
is somehow being reconciled.
And all these heavenly powers from whatever
beyond they are,
they are reconciled in Christ Jesus.
We live in a reconciled world.
And day by day, this has very immediate kind of applications
to how we live before God.
We live reconciled.
The old has passed.
In Christ Jesus, the new has come.
So Paul now turns from the two sets of five impurities
to the new traits that one puts on.
When one looks to the top and sees where the
bar is placed,
in Christ Jesus as our Lord and our model,
then he suggests five different ways we can
reflect Christ.
Number one, compassion.
We need to be a people who have compassion for
the needs of others.
We've had some great stories.
There's the presentation of Harold Schenck,
which I thought was powerful.
And he talked about various people who have
given their lives,
some for neglected children,
some for people in other lands to share the gospel.
We need to have compassion as we go forth.
Maybe I think myself, if I've grown in some
ways after almost 60 years
of being a believer, that it's in compassion we grow,
Paul says, from moment to moment into his glory,
having a heart where there's people who have needs.
Paul also talks about kindness, having a heart
for interest of others.
Here I'll talk about a woman.
I was an elder for, I think, 14 years at Minter
Lane here in Abilene
when I lived in Abilene.
We had a woman in that congregation by the name
of Dame Hamilton.
She's sort of a small woman, came up to about
this size.
She never married.
Her parents owned a hardware store here in
Abilene, which she inherited.
And she was a good businesswoman and carried on.
And she did pretty well.
She lived very simply, didn't spend much.
She'd come to church and she'd have her pockets
full of candies
and the kids would come up to her.
Well, that's significant.
But if anybody had a need, she helped.
Whenever we had special contributions at church
for mission projects, family needs, whatever
they were,
Dame always probably did more than anybody else.
We had a treasurer named David Jones.
And he one time said to the elders,
you know, I'm a little embarrassed for us to
put in another special contribution
because Dame just excels in giving to all these
needs that come up.
Don't you think we're depriving Dame?
I doubt that.
Dame knew what her ability was.
But think how she used it.
She used it to the glory of God.
She was a woman of compassion.
She's now deceased, I think, maybe 15 years ago.
But she was a great woman, a sister in the Lord.
So we need to be people who think about the
compassion of Jesus.
In the 17th century, they talked about the
miracles of Christ
as the way to prove that He was the divine Son
of God.