Committed to the Church
Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church, of which I became a minister according to the stewardship from God that was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to his saints. To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. Him 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.
In reading this passage, I can’t help but be moved by Paul’s overwhelming commitment to the cause of Christ and to the Church. He was fully devoted and there was no hint of him turning back from his commitment. Through the course of his ministry he underwent numerous stonings, persecutions, beatings, floggings, and eventually he was martyred for the cause of Christ. This was not a man who was wishy-washy, a slacker, or a phony. He was surrendered absolutely, 100% to the Church, the ministry of the Gospel, and to Christ.
In this post we will look at how Paul was committed and to what he was committed. I want to challenge you as to where your commitments lie and how certain and strong they are. Are you one who is fully devoted to Christ and the Gospel, willing to undergo whatever consequence for the sake of Christ and the glory of His name? Are you willing to make whatever offering is requested of your life in order to be obedient to God’s bidding? Or are you one who is wavering in your commitment, weak in your follow-through, and cold in your effectiveness for the Gospel’s sake? Has the enemy built up strongholds in your life that have turned your focus and hindered your obedience? Have the cares of this life stolen your heart from full devotion to Christ; robbing God of the worship and surrender due Him; robbing the Church of your service; and robbing you of true blessing, peace, and joy?
What is Commitment?
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as to “obligate or bind…to pledge or assign to some particular course or use.” In a scriptural sense, bind is a good word to describe commitment, and Jesus gave the best word picture to illustrate the commitment He requires:
(Mark 8:31-38) – And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again. And he said this plainly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and seeing his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.” And he called to him the crowd with his disciples and said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.
True commitment in the eyes of Jesus, is to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Him. The act of committing is to bind ourselves to something, for a believer it’s as if we are binding ourselves to the cross, just as Jesus did. Once you are bound to the cross, there is no turning back. It is a one-way street with one inevitable end. The image of a person taking up a cross could not have been viewed in a light sense by the people in Jesus day. There was no lightheartedness or triviality associated with a cross. It was serious, it was urgent, and it was drastic. You did not accidentally take up a cross. You did not inadvertently take up a cross. You could not be philosophically persuaded to take up a cross. You could not be emotionally manipulated into taking up a cross. No, a person took up a cross for one reason and one reason alone, and that was to be crucified upon it. Once the cross was on your back, death was imminent. Jesus could have used no other words that held more weight with the people to whom He was speaking than to say “take up your cross”.
Once the cross was on your back, death was imminent. Jesus could have used no other words that held more weight with the people to whom He was speaking than to say "take up your cross."
The world does not understand this kind of commitment. Jesus told Peter that he did not have in mind the things of God, but the things of man. What God is about and the commitment He demands is foreign to the natural mind and to the world’s way of thinking and operating. One of the greatest examples of the disparity between God’s mind and man’s mind is the divorce rate in this country. More than half of marriages end in divorce. That means that more than half of lifetime commitments end before the lifetime is up. So they weren’t lifetime commitments at all, they were short term commitments. In the Kingdom of God there is no such thing as short term commitment. To be committed for a little while and then to renege, is full disobedience with God and considered no commitment at all. In our world, it has become perfectly acceptable to say you will do something and then change your mind later.
Pauls’ Commitment
Paul was an amazing man who understand the commitment Jesus required. There is no mistaking Paul’s commitment, and in our passage we see his overwhelming commitment to three specific things: the Church, the Gospel, and Christ.
The main focus of these verses is Paul’s commitment to the Church, specifically the church in Colossae. His was no small commitment either. Let’s read,
Now I rejoice in what was suffered for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ's afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church. I have become its servant by the commission God gave me to present to you the word of God in its fullness - the mystery that has been kept hidden for ages and generations, but is now disclosed to the saints. To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.
We proclaim him, admonishing and teaching everyone with all wisdom, so that we may present everyone perfect in Christ. To this end I labor, struggling with all his energy, which so powerfully works in me.
I want you to know how much I am struggling for you and for those at Laodicea, and for all who have not met me personally. My purpose is that they may be encouraged in heart and united in love, so that they may have the full riches of complete understanding, in order that they may know the mystery of God, namely, Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. I tell you this so that no one may deceive you by fine-sounding arguments. For though I am absent from you in body, I am present with you in spirit and delight to see how orderly you are and how firm your faith in Christ is.
Note all the strong words Paul uses which describe the level of his commitment such as suffer, affliction, labor, and struggle. These are the words he is using to describe his commitment to the Church. My first point to note here is that we are immediately onto something that is foreign to our thinking, our culture, and our experience. For the most part, Christians in America do not know a commitment to the Church that equals suffer, affliction, labor, and struggle. This is not a concept we are familiar with—at least, not the majority of American Christians. We should be made aware that real New Testament Church is a hard business, it is demanding, it involves great struggle, affliction, persecution, labor and toil, and it might never reach the level of glamour, pomp and circumstance that we tend to call church in our day. If we’re going to do real church, like Paul did real church, then we will have to acquaint ourselves with the things in which Paul was quite familiar; namely, suffering, struggle, affliction, and labor.
We should be made aware that real New Testament Church is a hard business, it is demanding, it involves great struggle, affliction, persecution, labor and toil, and it might never reach the level of glamour, pomp and circumstance that we tend to call church in our day.
The Individuals in the Church
Paul was not just committed to the Church as a whole, but to the individuals in the Church. “We proclaim him, admonishing and teaching everyone with all wisdom, so that we may present everyone perfect in Christ. To this end I labor, struggling with all his energy, which so powerfully works in me.” He wanted to present everyone mature in Christ. He was not content with just a few growing in Christ, but he wanted and struggled for every single person.
If you consider this, it is no small commitment. This means that no matter who the person may be—their background, education, financial status, ethnicity, sinful past, present struggles, or whatever—he was committed to seeing them grow to maturity in Christ. He understood that such an incredible task would need God’s divine empowerment, and the only reason he was successful was due to God’s working through him, as he admitted “with all His energy, which so powerfully works in me.”
What I’m about to say does not sit well with my natural man, but my spirit gets excited by it. Fulfilling God’s mission for us as a church will not be easy. It will be hard. It will take us to the brink of what we can endure, and it will require the divine, supernatural power of God to get us through, to make it grow, and to bear fruit for the Kingdom. It’s going to be hard. So I must ask, are you willing for it to be hard? Are you willing to go through a great struggle, even affliction and suffering if necessary? We need to make sure we are counting the cost before we commit to the journey of church. You need to know God has brought you to the church you are in, and you need to continue in a full commitment to Christ. You should be there only out of obedience to Christ.
You don’t join a church because you need a church, or because you didn’t like the other choices. You join a church because God has called you to that church. Anything else does not have in mind the things of God but the things of man. Otherwise, you are living out the consumer driven mindset we are trying to come against. We have Christians that jump from church to church because they can’t find one that meets all of their likes and dislikes. But this is not how God has set things to be. We should be a part of a church because God is there, and because He has called us to be there. That is it. Obedience to Christ should be the foundational motive for choosing a church home.
The Word of God
Paul was committed to a Church that was committed to the Word of God: “I have become its servant by the commission God gave me to present to you the word of God in its fullness—the mystery that has been kept hidden for ages and generations, but is now disclosed to the saints.”
And again he says, “…so that they may have the full riches of complete understanding, in order that they may know the mystery of God, namely, Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.”
He understood that there was far more to Church than just program after program; rather, at the heart of what Church is all about is to know God, and it is the ministry of the Word of God that leads to the full knowledge of God. It is a great travesty in our day that so many churches are focused on so many things—good things—but are lacking a true commitment to the ministry of the Word of God, and specifically the Word of God in its fullness. We can’t just pick the parts of the Bible that we like and avoid all the harder parts. We can’t just pick the parts that are attractive to the culture and water down the parts that are offensive to them. We have to respect and love God and His Word so much that we have a passion to know it and proclaim it in its fullness.
The Glory of Christ
Paul was committed to a church that was committed to the glory of Christ: “To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Paul and the early Church understood that the glory of God in the Gospel was not centered on having a nice group of people to be with, or having people who would be your friends, or having stuff to do through the programs of the church. Ultimately, the glory in it all is centered in Christ—Christ in you, the hope of glory. The Gospel and the church were to be focused on this simplest of all truths “Christ in you”. This was the hope. Jesus uttered this message in John 17, “I pray…that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us.”
It is the Christ in us and the us in Christ that provides the power and purpose for all of life, for each believer and the Church. This focusing and centering on Christ and being in Christ, is the understanding that God’s glory is ultimate. He is at the center. He is the way to eternal life, not our works. He is the provider of the grace that brings our forgiveness, not any righteousness of our own.
This also means they were not committed to their church being something worthy of praise or recognition, but everything was empowered by Christ in us. The goal is not to have a church that makes a name for itself; rather, to spread the love of Christ, the Word of Christ, and proclaim and magnify the glory of Christ. This is real church. And it requires real commitment. Not a verbal commitment to some creed, but a life commitment that leads to sweat, tears, pain, stress, joy, and glory in Christ.
The Ministry of the Gospel
Paul was committed to a Church that was committed to the ministry of the Gospel: “To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” In other words, they were committed to sharing the truth of Christ with lost people. They wanted the Gospel to spread throughout the world, and especially to the lost people in their surrounding area. When they said Gentiles, we could call it the really lost people. To a Jew, a Gentile was extremely far from God. The Jews were God’s chosen people, but the Gentiles represented everything that was contrary to God. I’m speaking as to what was in the mind of Jews in those days, not to how our present culture thinks on things. Since they were committed to seeing the mystery of God be made known to the Gentiles, it is the equivalent of us being committed to sharing the Gospel with the really lost people of our area and the world. This might be the people we consider the unreachable. We don’t just want to reach the lost people, but the really lost people too.
I am being a little silly here because if you’re lost, you’re lost; there are no varying degrees of lost-ness. But it is equal to some of our thinking. We do see some people as lost but close to the Gospel in a since. These are people who are more likely to step into the doors of a church, because there is one right across the street from them. But there are people within our culture who are less likely to step into a church. We might consider these people the really lost. I think of my grandmother who for many years would not go to church because she didn’t feel her clothes were nice enough. These are people who seem to have every strike against them in the game of life—even the nice unbelievers want nothing to do with them. (Similar to the thought that an unbelieving Jew would still have nothing to do with a Gentile in the time of the New Testament church.)
The goal is not to have a church that makes a name for itself; rather, to spread the love of Christ, the Word of Christ, and proclaim and magnify the glory of Christ. This is real church.
Conclusion
Are you committed? One reason Jesus said we must take up our cross daily, is that He understood our condition. We are prone to being committed to Him one day, and then committed to ourselves the next. We must be aware of this. And we must make every effort day after day after day after day, to take up our cross, binding ourselves to Christ, and following Him obediently, no matter what the cost, for the glory of God.
This is a focus on our hearts and where our affections truly lie. May God open our eyes and soften our hearts to understand the truth about ourselves, that we might be led to the path of complete commitment and absolute surrender to Christ. If there is any wicked way in us, may the Holy Spirit reveal it. If there is any deception, may God shine a light into our darkness. If there be a false commitment, may God lead us to repentance and surrender, for the glory of God.
