But Paul’s list is in the opposite order. Not that a knowledge of Christ is less important.  Its importance is actually highlighted by being the culmination of this list.  Everything that Paul has prayed for until now are like rungs on a ladder leading up to a true knowledge of the mystery of God, Christ Himself.

If you unwrap the logic of Paul’s prayer, you see that the knitting together of our hearts results in hearts that are encouraged.  Encouraged hearts can attain to all the wealth that comes from the full assurance of understanding.  This full assurance results in a true knowledge of Christ.

Paul uses a compelling picture of Christ as the treasure chest of God, in which all the riches of wisdom and knowledge are hidden.  A true knowledge of Christ is not knowing what the box looks like or even simply knowing how to open it.  A true knowledge of Christ is a knowledge of the treasures inside.  You’ve opened the box, you’ve seen the treasures, and you are beginning to examine each jewel, each piece of gold, each priceless item.

So how do you open the box and start studying the treasure within?  Paul, in a burst of delight in these treasures, says in Romans, “Oh the depths of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God!  How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways!“  Yet Jesus gives us hope that we can indeed begin to understand these riches because He promised to send us the Holy Spirit.  In John 16:13-15, He encourages His disciples with this promise:

But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth…He will glorify Me, for He will take of Mine and will disclose it to you.  All things that the Father has are Mine; therefore I said that He takes of Mine and will disclose it to you.

Jesus’ description of His relationship with the Father in these verses fits exactly with Paul’s image of a treasure chest: “all things that the Father has are Mine,” “God’s mystery, that is Christ Himself, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.”

But Jesus goes on to describe not only His relationship with the Father, but with the Holy Spirit.  The Spirit of truth is our key to open the box and our expert to point out the amazing intricacies of each piece of treasure that easily escape the amateur’s notice.

This is what we want for our small groups and for ourselves: to know Christ and all the treasures we have in Him. Strive for this in your prayers for each of your group members.  And don’t forget the path that leads to true knowledge.  Never bypass unity and love, encouragement, and assurance in an effort to get to knowledge. You’ll end up with the “knowledge that puffs up” and wonder what happened to the love.

Here are links to the sermon questions for this week. They are separated by campus because the West Pasco campus is one week behind the Richland campus.

• Richland Campus, taking a one week break from the Blood of Christ sermon series: Questions on Todd Hunter’s sermon
• West Pasco Campus, on week two of the Blood of Christ sermon series: The Blood of Christ, part 2

Great dinner from Famous Dave’s. Singing culminating with Our God Reigns. Theresa Richardson on suffering and leadership. Music, Scripture, and sculpture by Robert McMinn. And now Todd Hunter. Post your takeaways below.

…begins in about an hour. This is a pic of the water/fire feature that we will make use of tonight. Will post more later.

In the first post of this series, I explained the discovery I had made of the concept of striving in the Christian life and of the goal of our striving: to present every man complete in Christ (Colossians 1:28-29). In the following posts, I have given examples of things to strive for in prayer so that you and your small group will grow to completion in Christ. These come from Paul’s prayer in Colossians 2:2-3. The first was “encouragement,” the second was “hearts knit together.” This third one is “the full assurance of understanding,” and the final one will be “a true knowledge of Christ.”

Paul prays that his disciples’ “hearts may be encouraged, having been knit together in love, and attaining to all the wealth that comes from the full assurance of understanding, resulting in a true knowledge of God’s mystery, that is, Christ Himself.”

What we want for our small groups is that each person will understand the truth of the Gospel clearly, without confusion or distortion, and be fully assured that he does understand it clearly. Each Christian has the opportunity to understand the Gospel definitely, distinctly, and clearly. Each one has the opportunity to be fully assured and settled in his convictions. Many today will tell you that this is not the case. They may tell you that the truth is relative. Or that it is vague: we see dimly and therefore cannot hold any definite convictions. But Andrew Bonar says firmly:

…the true preacher will stand with Paul upon this question, that is, he will endure a great conflict before God rather than surrender the cause of that definite, clear assured understanding among his people.  Love never compromises the truth.

Though Mr. Bonar is speaking of preachers, the same applies to small group leaders.  Endure that conflict before God rather than surrendering the cause of the full assurance of understanding among your small group.

He goes on to explain the connection between the first two things to fight for and this one:

Now if a sense of God’s love in Christ be cultivated and enjoyed, if the comfort of the gospel abounds in our hearts, we cannot but attain to the full assurance of understanding.  In such a path there are no insuperable obstacles.  It is simply to fleshly pride of opinion, the duskiness of worldly thinking that makes difficult the full reception of the truth.  Love is itself intelligence, divine intelligence.  … In other words, it is as we live up to the truth we now have that we receive more truth.

This full assurance of understanding comes with great wealth.  This is the basis of the assurance of faith, and the assurance of faith is the basis for the assurance of hope.  Bonar exclaims, “In this combination of assurances, what ineffable blessedness there is!” This assurance of understanding keeps its owner immovable int eh midst of false teaching (see verse 4), and is also connected with genuine humility.

This love is itself the knitting together of our hearts because it makes us one in Christ. When we recognize God’s love for us is truly in and through Christ, we can begin to love others in Christ as well.  We know that God loves us not because of anything we are or do, but because of Who Christ is and what He has done.  In the same way, we love one another - other Christians - not because of who they are or what they have done, but because of Christ’s person and work for them on the cross.  Even the most unlovely Christian becomes lovely when we view him in Christ.

This knitting together of our hearts becomes “a solid phalanx in the service of divine truth,” as Nicholson puts it.  Ecclesiastes 4:12 chimes in, “ A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.“  Nicholson elaborates:

The knitting together of heart to heart acts and reacts upon each one’s personal sympathies with the truth, and therefore multiplies the comfort in the soul, enlarging and consolidating the strength.

This knitting together … is to be labored for in clear teaching, earnest prayer, and in the cultivation of the brotherhood in Christ.

So when you are praying for your small group, struggle earnestly before God, as Paul did, that “their hearts may encouraged, being knit together in love.”

Colossians 2:1-3 says:

For I want you to know how great a struggle I have for you and for those at Laodicea and for all who have not seen me face to face, that their hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love, to reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God’s mystery, which is Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

Another of my father’s Biblical studies books is Oneness with Christ: Popular Studies in the Epistle to the Colossians by Bishop W.R. Nicholson.  Many of the ideas I want to share with you are owing to Bishop Nicholson.

Notice the striving prayer Paul prays.  Remember that his goal is to bring Christians into the clearness of the gospel doctrine and under its abounding power.  These are the specific ways he prays to accomplish that goal.  As we look more closely at this prayer, keep in mind that Paul’s goal for the Colossians is also our goal for our small groups.  The specific things he fights for in prayer are our struggles as well.

First, he prays that their hearts be encouraged.  The Greek tense gives the sense of ongoing encouragement: past, present, and future.  You may ask, as I did, why encouragement? What is so important about our hearts being encouraged that it would be the first victory Paul fights for in the hearts of disciples?  Nicholson’s answers,

In the comforting of the heart by the truth, the truth is secured. …If one is not in sympathy with the subject [of his study], he will make poor progress in its understanding, and so a man may theoretically receive every doctrine of the Gospel, but if he himself is not comforted thereby, he may fall an easy prey to the archers of error.

You can see this idea elsewhere in the Bible when Jesus tells his disciples in John 15:11 that the reason for his teaching was that “My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.”  Another common reference to this is Nehemiah 8:10: “The joy of the LORD is your strength.”

Nicholson defines the heart that is being encouraged as “entering consciously into a feeling of [the Gospel's] reality and all-pervading sense of its sweetness.”  He reminds us that this is attainable for every believer, is their safety from falsehood and deception, and may be habitually and aboundingly their possession.

Bruce Wilkinson, in his book Secrets of the Vine: Breaking Through to Abundance, underscores the importance of this joy and encouragement in the gospel:

One of the primary reasons [so few Christians fervently pursue relationship with God], I’m convinced, is that we don’t really believe God likes us. Sure, we believe God loves us in the theological sense (”God loves everybody, right?”), but we don’t feel particularly liked by Him.  We’re convinced that He remembers all the bad things we’ve done in the past and is quick to judge how we’re doing now.  We assume He’s impatient, busy with more important things, and reluctant to spend time with us.

Encouragement from the gospel is the first thing to contend for in your own heart and in the hearts of your disciples.  Without a deep, abounding joy in God’s love for us in Christ, any knowledge we have is dry and lifeless.  We are left weak and wide open for spiritual attack.  I’ll close with another quote from Nicholson:

No ministry is true to its God-given aim which does not preach this happy privilege and duty of believers and urge it upon them, and endure a mighty conflict before God to make them conforted, and therefore [to make them] the always-triumphant holders of the truth in the midst of a gain-saying world.

Ever wonder why?

How many times have you pondered the “why” behind something? For instance, why do we observe daylight saving time? I’d wager that most people, without the help of Wikipedia, can not explain why we observe daylight saving time.

Can you explain why you participate in a small group? How would you answer that question?

I’m feeling overwhelmed with all the of organizational aspects of small group leading and oversight. And when I get overwhelmed it is easy to lose perspective…to lose sight of why we do small groups…to lose sight of Jesus, the author and perfecter of my faith. As we kick-off a new year of small group ministry, let us not lose sight of why we do GROW groups. The biblical mandate that precedes participation in small groups is to  make disciples (or followers) of Jesus.

So, if someone were to ask you why you participate in a small group your answer should be “It’s one way that I help make disciples of Jesus.”

I’ve been studying Colossians this summer, which just happened to coincide with a challenge from others in the prayer group Watchmen on the Wall to study striving prayer.  I’m fortunate enough to be “storing” many of my father’s seminary books while he is out of the country for a couple of years, and among those is a weighty collection entitled Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, edited by Gerhard Kittel.  Reading the article on the word group agon, agonizomai changed my life.

You’ll easily recognize the relationship between these Greek words and the English words agony and agonize.  The word agon was originally simply a “place of meeting,” but evolved, as words do, to mean the “place of contest” or “stadium,” then the “contest” itself, and finally, in the Greek of the 1st century, to mean any kind of conflict.  The related word agonizomai means “to carry on a conflict, contest, debate, or legal suit.”  These words carry the connotation of the struggling hero of virtue and the martyr fighting to the death.

If you enjoy etymology, as I do, you probably find this interesting.  But you can imagine that this is not what I found life-changing.

Paul was the main author who used this word group in the New Testament, and in his writing you can find five motifs, or main thoughts surrounding his usage of them:

1. The thought of a goal that can only be reached with the full expenditure of all our energies.  Work for the gospel is not only faithful fulfillment of duty, but a tense exertion, a passionate struggle, a constantly renewed concentration of forces on the attainment of the goal.

2. Not only full exertion is implied, but rigid denial. This is not the asceticism of the monk, but the control of a fighter.  This does not mean contempt for the world, but the insight that the better is enemy to the best.  Even what is right and good may have to be renounced for the goal.

3. The thought of obstacles, dangers, and catastrophes through which a Christian must fight his way.

4. The sharpest form this takes is the battle of suffering fulfilled in martyrdom.  This is especially clear in Hebrews and the Pastoral Epistles (1 & 2 Timothy, Titus).

5. The supreme goal is not our own salvation alone, but that of many.  The one stands for the many (Col 4:12) and the many must stand for the one (Rom 15:30).  Here you can see that the form of the battle is prayer.  In prayer the will of God and the will of man become one; prayer is where human struggling and effective divine operation meet.  In prayer also, we can represent one another and stand in the breach.

The word is commonly translated into English as striving or struggling, and in Paul’s writings, it characterizes the Christian life.  There is a battle and there is a goal.  You’ll find Paul’s goal in various places throughout his epistles, but it seems clearest - and most clearly linked with his striving - in Colossians 1:28-29:

Him [Christ] we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.

This is the goal.  Recognizing this goal and realizing the struggle needed to obtain it are what has changed my life. In the next installment I’ll talk a little more about the struggle specifically - or how to fight the battle - from Colossians 2:1-3.