Colossians 1:24-2:2 –

²⁴Now 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, ²⁵of 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, ²⁶the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to his saints. ²⁷To 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. ²⁸Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. ²⁹For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.

2 ¹For 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, ²that 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…

Introduction

Welcome to the start of missions week. I’m exceedingly thankful for the culture-shaping effect it has had on our church over the years. One of the most tangible ways I’ve seen that play out is in the fact that missions is normal at Grace. No one wonders whether or not missions ought to be a part of our church-life. We all know and love the reality that as long as there are people around the world who have not heard the good news of Jesus, who have not yet tasted and seen that He alone can satisfy our souls, we must go to them or support those who have.

But if we’re being honest, we’ll admit that missions is a scary and costly and intimidating. With that in mind, Kyle introduced me to the theme of missions week this year with the following thoughts…

“How many of us fall short in our sending and our going because we see it too much as a loss of something? A loss of money, loss of time, loss of comfort, a loss of fulfillment, or a loss of safety and security? Yes, missions is loss, but it is a loss of that which is lesser, and a gain of that which is greater. Greater joy. Greater purpose. Greater satisfaction” (Kyle Puelston).

Grace, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that all of life is one choice after another between lesser or greater. Likewise, I don’t think it’s misleading to say that sanctification is God’s work of giving us increasing appetite for all things greater.

Our main problem is that sin has made it so that we often can’t tell the greater from the lesser and even when we can, we often don’t prefer it, and even when we do, we are often unwilling to pay the cost to get it.

And here’s the key for us to grasp this morning: As long as that’s the case, missions will never find its proper place in our own lives or in the life of our church.

Missions week this year is a call to die to that which is lesser in order that we might live for that which is greater. It’s a plea to ask the Lord to help us increasingly die to all the sinful and even “fine” things in our life, that we might come alive to the greatest things—to Jesus and all that He has commanded.

Through Paul’s example, we are given a crystal-clear picture of what that looks like.

The big ideas of this sermon are that God commands missions, missions is hard, and we’ll never do the hard work of missions if we aren’t convinced that it is greater. The main takeaway is that we’d work hard to learn, love, and live the greater, no matter the cost (that we’d read our Bibles, pray for the Spirit’s transforming power, and spur one another on in missions).

Missions In Paul’s Life

Again, there are three components to the big idea of this sermon: (1) God commands missions, (2) Missions is hard, and (3) We’ll never do the hard work of missions if we aren’t convinced that it is greater. Paul most certainly understood and believed and lived in light of those biblical truths. To help you see that, and then apply it, consider with me six high-level observations from our passage.

Paul Rejoiced in His Suffering as a Missionary (1:24)

Almost from the moment of his conversion, Paul spent his entire life serving as a missionary. That is, he gave himself to traveling around the known world, telling everyone he could about the good news of God’s grace in Jesus Christ. He did so across every geographical, cultural, linguistic, political and, economic boundary there was at that time.

In the course of nearly 30 years of missions work, Paul traveled across two continents, somewhere in the vicinity of 10,000 miles, personally sharing the gospel with hundreds, if not thousands of people.

And in that time, he suffered much. He suffered to the point that it’s probably nearly impossible for most of us to imagine it, his perseverance in it, or even his lack of complaining about it.

But more than merely making it through and keeping his complaints to himself, Paul explicitly tells us (in v.24), “Now I rejoice in my sufferings…” He did the hard work, kept doing the hard work for three decades, and saw his hardships not as a flaw of his ministry, but as a feature, as opportunities to rejoice.

That ought to cause two questions to spring immediately to mind: (1) What suffering, and (2) Why rejoice in it?

What suffering? It’d be a significant understatement to simply say, “a lot.” By the time Paul wrote his letter to the Colossians and claimed to be rejoicing in his suffering (you can read about a good deal of it in 2 Corinthians 11:23-2), he’d already been beaten, lashed, stoned, shipwrecked, sleepless, homeless, famished, and betrayed.

Most immediately, in the context of this letter, Paul was suffering imprisonment, in “chains” (4:18), for declaring “the mystery of Christ” (4:3). And all of those things, multiple times (including shipwrecked).

Again, needless to say, that level and length of suffering goes far beyond what any of us can even imagine.

If that’s the nature of his suffering, how/why in the world would he rejoice in it? You do know that sounds a bit crazy, right?

Paul seems to be living out what James commanded: “Count it all joy…when you meet trials of various kinds.” I’ve always found that to be the most counterintuitive passage in the whole Bible. (I know there are others that should seem more that way, but they just don’t.) On the surface, trials and joy seem to me to be the definition of opposite ends of the spectrum. Nearly every part of my rational brain is convinced that to move away from one is to move toward the other; that they cannot coexist.

The theme of missions week, the opening words of our passage, and Paul’s entire Christian life, are a direct assault on that line of thinking. But again, why? How?

The short version is that in all of these things, Paul told his readers that he was willingly dying to his old self and life, to his old desires and motivations, to his old priorities and privileges, and to his old thinking and reasoning. And he told them that he was doing so for the sake of living for something much, much (incalculably) greater. Everything he once held dear and built his life upon, had become to him as rubbish compared to the opportunity to know Jesus, obey Jesus, and proclaim the good news of Jesus to the world.

The remaining six observations are the meat on that bone. They are the alternate calculus which reckons suffering as joy instead of ruin. They are the greater that makes it worth dying to all lesser. They are the things that an above the sun exchange rate values above all earthly comfort. They are the answer to the question of how a man or woman of God can rejoice in their trials of obedience.

Paul Rejoiced in His Suffering for the Sake of the Church (1:24)

The second observation, and the first explanation for Paul’s rejoicing in his suffering, is found in the very next clause in v.24, “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake…” [that is, according to the end of the verse,] …for the sake of [Jesus’] body, that is, the church…” (also, “for you” according to v.25).

In other words, Paul knew that the suffering he endured for telling people about Jesus was for the benefit of all God’s people. It was a benefit for those who had not yet heard the gospel in that they might hear, believe, and be saved. And it was a benefit for those already trusting in Jesus in that, as we’ll see from 1:28 on, it resulted in their spiritual maturity.

In his second letter to the church at Corinth (2 Corinthians 4:8-11), he says it like this…

We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; ⁹persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; ¹⁰always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our bodi...