Kathie and I celebrated our wedding anniversary on Friday. 27 years. Sometimes people ask what the secret of a long marriage is. My answer is this; we go out to a restaurant twice a week and arrange a little candlelit dinner, with soft music, and a slow walk home. She goes on Tuesdays and I go on Fridays! No seriously, here’s to you darling; no matter how old you are, you don’t look it.
Marriages require a great deal of maintenance don’t they? No marriage just turns out well on its own. It takes effort to make the relationship work because however in love a bride and groom are on their wedding day they’re entering into a coalition of two sinners, and sin always spoils everything. Your garden needs trimming and weeding otherwise it becomes a jungle. In the same way, married couples need to constantly affirm one another, listen to one another, be patient with one another and forgive one another or the marriage will soon become life-sapping. The thing is what is true for gardens and marriages is also true for churches.
Ask most people in the UK what they think of church and you will hear words like “boring,” “hypocritical,” “irrelevant” and “judgmental.” But God’s great vision for his Church is of an alternative society, a new community, an inspirational fellowship of people quite unlike anything else you can find on earth.
Have you ever asked yourself why Jesus spent three years with a motley collection of lame ducks and losers? He did it to build them into a united band of brothers capable of taking on the might of the Roman Empire and winning. It has been calculated that 44% of the letters of the New Testament are specifically about how we should get along with one another. If anyone thinks it is inconsequential that so much of the New Testament is about relationships they’re wrong. One of the key measures of our effectiveness as a church is how we get on with each other.
The theologian Andrew Kirk puts it this way: “What the New Testament means by the Church is not an institution which owns property, performs rites and organises meetings, or even one that plans strategies to evangelise unreached people. Rather, [the church] is a group of ordinary people who, because they are experiencing the immense grace of a compassionate God, are learning how to overcome hostility between people, forgive and trust one another, share what they have and encourage one another in wholesome and joyous relationships.”
That is right. There are, in fact, 54 ‘one anothers’ in the New Testament, and each one is a command, not an option on a menu. Love one another, bear one another’s burdens, pray for one another, wash one another’s feet and agree with one another encourage one another, teach and admonish one another, be devoted to one another, greet one another with a holy kiss… But today, we’re going to consider what it means to bear with one another and forgive one another, both of which are found in Colossians 3.
Putting On Christ
Read Colossians 3 carefully is all about you - not as you see yourself but as God sees you. It gives you God’s perspective - and therefore the correct view - of the way things really are with us. Our understanding of spiritual reality is like looking through an opaque window; it’s always distorted by sin. From the moment we are born every one of us naturally sees ourselves as the centre of the universe. Everything revolves around me; what I want, what I like, what I need. So we need to be educated by the Word of God and learn to place Christ at the centre of all that is.
According to Colossians 3, as God sees you, once you’re a Christian, the personality you were born with (with you at the centre of everything), as far as God is concerned - it’s all dead and buried. It’s finished. All the wrongs you have done and every wrong done to you… the funeral is over. And it says that God has made you a new personality, a new self with a new heart. Every believer in Christ is a new creation, born again. “You died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God” (v3). “You have been raised with Christ” (v1). That is your status in God’s eyes if you are a Christian this morning.
It means this; putting it crudely, because you and I have been given royal status by God it is expected of us now to show a bit of class. So in v7 it says, “you used to walk in these [sinful] ways, in the life you once lived, but now you must rid yourselves of all [that]. We saw this week that, just because someone has connections with the royal family, it doesn’t mean they automatically live accordingly. It’s one thing to be given the status, it’s quite another to adopt the lifestyle.
The way the Bible puts it in v9-10 is this; it’s just like God gives you an entirely new wardrobe. You open the door and all the garments in there are classy, brand new, well designed, made from the best materials and perfectly fitting. Becoming a Christian was like taking off your old dirty, stained, ill-fitting, badly designed, nylon rags with holes in the arms and knees and being dressed in the very finest clothes you have ever worn. “You have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self.”
The thing is about clothes though is that you have to put them on every morning! Every day, you get up, get washed, open the wardrobe and you put on each garment, one at a time, until you’re fully dressed and ready to go out.
So that’s where we pick up the train of thought in our reading; v12.
“Therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves 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.”
This is the kind of heart and attitude God wants you and me to choose and display – consciously choosing these virtues as if we were putting them on when we get dressed in the morning.
Of course, the royal robes God invites us to put on are not made of natural material. They are woven from spiritual fibres. Try as you might in your own power to always be compassionate, kind, humble, gentle and patient, they don’t come naturally. You need to let God grow them in you.
For instance, compassion. The old human nature with me in the centre says things like, “She deserved that, I don’t feel sorry for her at all.” But the new nature with God at the centre says, “She must feel terrible. But for the grace of God that’s where I’d be. I’ll give her a call and see how she is.”
Kindness; the old human nature with me in the centre says, “I’ll do my fair share but no more.” But the new nature with God at the centre says, “I’ll cheerfully go the extra mile here and that will be an offering of praise to God.”
Patience; the old human nature with me in the centre meets inconvenience and says, “I’m important, I deserve better than this!” But the new nature with God at the centre smiles and says, “the Lord is slow to anger and abounding in love. How can I reflect his heart in this situation?”
Forbearance
So v13: “Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.”
What does it mean to bear with someone? It’s a bit of a strange expression. When you phone someone up and they ask you to hold the line, sometimes they say, “Just bear with me a minute…” It sort of means, “I want you to just wait and not get annoyed.” I looked up the original verb in my Greek Interlinear and traced all the other times it is used in the New Testament.
It turns up in Mathew 17.17 when the disciples failed to drive out an evil spirit and Jesus says, “You unbelieving and perverse generation, how long shall I stay with you? How long shall I put up with you?” So we might say “put up with others in the church even when they are slow to learn, annoying and a bit useless.”
The word appears again in Acts 18.14 where it is translated “to listen to someone.” You know when you’re in a conversation and you are so focused on putting across a point of view that you don’t really hear what the other one’s saying because you’re preparing to say your bit? Well, I think it’s saying here that “bearing with one another” means really listening to what others are saying even if our first thought is that they’re going to talk rubbish.
It appears again in 1 Corinthians 4.12 when Paul talks about his response to constant hassle. “When we are cursed, we bless; when we are persecuted, we endure it.” So we might say “endure others in church even when you are shabbily treated and gossiped about by them.”
So put up with one another’s irritations, listen to one another’s words and endure one another’s failings for the sake of Christ. Bear with one another.
Forgiveness
Verse 13 continues, “forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.
If you have a grievance it means you have a legitimate reason to feel offended. For example, if someone promises to help you clean up the garage, but instead they fall asleep watching football on the sofa, you have grounds to feel aggrieved. If someone promises to meet you at a certain time, and they forget and leave you standing out in the rain, you have a valid grievance. I bet everyone in this place today could come up with a list of legitimate reasons why we have been upset with certain people. In fact, here’s a list I’ve been keeping since I arrived here nearly two years ago… (produce long roll of paper). And I’m sure people could produce a roll of paper twice as long for the things I’ve aggrieved them over in half the time.
The Bible doesn’t say “don’t have grievances.” It assumes that you will. It says, when you do have grievances, don’t run away, sort it out.
You may not have realised this, but there are in the New Testament several different words translated “forgive.” The one here in Colossians 3.13 means to freely or graciously give something away. The idea is of someone treating someone else better than they really deserve. Imagine someone says something untrue and quite hurtful about you, or someone badly lets you down. And they realise it and say “sorry.”
What about your pound of flesh? Natural justice suggests that you have the right to demand something from them in compensation for the distress they caused you. But this word “forgive” means not only do you refuse to insist on reparation, but instead you freely and graciously return good for bad. That is the meaning of this word. “Forgive as the Lord forgave you.” When the Lord forgives, he doesn’t just make a bad situation neutral, he goes one step further and makes a neutral situation beautiful.
There’s a story about a man who drank a bit too much at a party and embarrassed his wife. The next morning he felt really bad and asked her to forgive him. She said she would, but day after day she kept bringing it up. So one day in discouragement he said to her, “I thought you said you forgave me.” She said, I did. He said, “Yes, but I was hoping you’d going to forgive and forget.” She said, “I have, I just don’t want you to forget that I have forgiven and forgotten!”
Ah, ah! No cheating… When you forgive, let it go. “Yes, but I keep thinking about it, it won’t go away.” Well, every time the thought comes back to mind, rebuke it and send it back to the cross, the place where God completely forgives and permanently forgets in Christ.
Ending
And finally, verse 14: “And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.” After you have dressed yourself with compassion and kindness and humility and gentleness and forbearance and forgiveness – after you have put all these other things on, then, over all these virtues cover yourself with love.
What kind of “love” are we talking about here? When people think of “love,” they usually think of two-way love. In other words – you love me, and I’ll love you too. I love you because there are certain things that attract me to you. And you love me because there are certain things that you like about me. But when the Bible says, “Over all these virtues put on love,” it’s talking about one-way love. In other words, you love me, even if I don’t love you back. You love me, even though there is nothing particularly loveable about me. It’s the kind of love that God has for the world. Even though you didn’t ask for it, Jesus loves you and died for your sins on the cross.
That’s the kind of love that God is saying he wants us to have here – a one-way kind of love. Love the unlovable. Love even though no one says thank you. Love even though no one appreciates what you do. Even though there are a million reasons to not love someone, love them anyway. “And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.”
Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 30th May 2010
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