This is the second entry in an occasional series of reflections that I am doing on the book of Colossians. The first entry, along with a brief explanation for why I am doing this, can be found here.
I will admit that I often find myself asking the question “what’s the point?”, when it comes to church. Not in the why-do-we-even-bother sense, but more in the what-sort-of-a-difference-is-all-of-the-stuff- that-we-say-and-do-and-talk-about sense. I suppose that comes from my desire to do more than just play church, and to instead really do work necessary to think through what sort of a difference church activity, spiritual disciplines, and other such activities are supposed to make. Whether or not those sorts of questions that were on his mind when he was writing Colossians, Paul addresses them nicely in chapter 1, verses 9-10.
“And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God.”
What an amazing prayer that is. Allow me to take one part of it at a time.
“…asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will…” The idea of ‘the will of God’ gets a lot of play in church, as it should. On some level, all of us want to know the will of God. Obeying the will of God may be a whole different story (too often it is for me), but I believe it would be fair to say that all of us who believe in the God of the Bible are at least marginally curious as to what his will is, particularly for our lives. While I certainly have not cracked the code on how to determine the will of God (and would be slightly suspicious of anyone who claimed that they have), I would suggest that the choices we make, and the way in which we control our influences effects how accurately we can know and understand God’s will. That, in my view, is a major reason why spiritual disciples such as Bible study, prayer, meditation, and church fellowship are important. It is in those contexts that our curiosity regarding God’s will is transformed into a revelatory searching for God’s will. From those disciplines comes a sort of “spiritual wisdom and understanding” that I believe can hardly be found outside of such communion with God. It is in our willingness to devote ourselves to these disciplines that the rubber meets the road, so to speak. In other words, they are an indicator of our desire to know, understand, be transformed by, and apply God’s will.
Furthermore, I would suggest that this “spiritual wisdom and understanding” is something that can be applied in virtually every arena of life. It can aid us as family members, as employees, as employers, as students, and in virtually any other situation. I am realizing more and more that as a college pastor it is my desire not to get the students in our ministry to do more things, but instead to engage in determining what it looks like to be Christian in the contexts that they already find themselves in. In other words, I want them to work through (as I try to do myself) how being Christian effects the way you go to school, or manage a grocery store, or work in a city parks and recreation office, or manage a golf course, or perform any of the other vocations that are represented in our community on Sunday nights.
And now I’ve got to go to class, so I’ll have to finish this post later…hopefully later on tonight…