Sermon Text: Colossians 1:3-8
Date: June 16, 2024
Event: Proper 6, Year B
Colossians 1:3-8 (EHV)
We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, 4because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and the love that you have for all the saints 5because of the hope that is stored up for you in heaven. You have already heard about this in the word of truth, the gospel 6that is present with you now. The gospel is bearing fruit and growing in the entire world, just as it also has been doing among you from the day you heard it and came to know the grace of God in truth. 7You learned this from Epaphras, our dear fellow servant, who is a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf. 8He is the one who told us about your love in the Spirit.
The Gospel Bears Fruit
Do you ever look around our little congregation on a Sunday morning and get a bit discouraged? Maybe it’s not even discouraged, but maybe it’s worry that comes across your heart. Almost 10 million people in the Bay Area, and our congregation’s membership normally hovers around 100 souls. Even when church is full, relatively speaking, we are tiny. What does that say about us? What does that say about God’s work in this world?
A few weeks ago, we celebrated the Day of Pentecost, and we saw the Holy Spirit’s arrival with power. But the main show of that power wasn’t in the sound of a rushing wind, tongues of fire, or sudden fluency in foreign languages for the disciples. The far greater miracle came later but also looked much more subtle. At the preaching of Peter and the others, three thousand people who had not believed in Jesus as their Savior left that day clinging to him by faith. That change of heart miracle, while perhaps not very flashy, was the most amazing thing to happen that day.
In our Gospel, Jesus compared the gospel's spread with seed being scattered on the ground. Seeds don’t look impressive. In fact, they seem to share more in common with pebbles than they do with anything powerful. Yet, what happens when you plant a seed in the ground with adequate water, sunlight, and nutrients in the soil? The seed sprouts, and a full-fledged plant grows up. Maybe it produces beautiful flowers or plants that are useful for nourishing the body. From this rather unremarkable start comes aesthetic beauty or, even more importantly, life-sustaining blessings from God.
This is the picture that Paul is working with when he speaks about the gospel with the Colossians. At the time Paul wrote to them, the Christians in the city of Colossae were besieged by false teachers. A popular false teaching distorted Jesus’ work and the comfort God wanted for his people. This teaching often focused people on the Old Testament ceremonial worship laws, saying that you had to follow them to benefit from Jesus’ death. These false teachers were adding works to God’s message of grace.
And from the outside, these false teachers may have appeared to have a point. This false teaching appealed to that part of every human being that wants to play some part, even if it’s very small, in our salvation. Also, Paul would not have looked very impressive. He was writing while under house arrest in Rome, so someone might mistakenly come to the conclusion that Paul’s incarceration was a sign of God’s displeasure with his teaching and God’s approval of these other teachers who were distorting the truth.
But Paul, even in these introductory verses of this brief letter, encourages the Colossians to look to God’s work for confidence and comfort: “We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, 4because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and the love that you have for all the saints 5because of the hope that is stored up for you in heaven. You have already heard about this in the word of truth, the gospel 6that is present with you now. The gospel is bearing fruit and growing in the entire world, just as it also has been doing among you from the day you heard it and came to know the grace of God in truth.” Paul doesn’t direct them to himself. He doesn’t point them to their own congregation for comfort. No, he wants the Colossians to take a holistic view of the work of God around them—around the world.
Let’s go back to our observations around us. We had our district convention earlier this week. These conventions serve a lot of purposes, but a huge focus is to give an update on the work of our church body as a whole. One of the statistics we heard in the reports was that in North America, membership in WELS churches is around 300,000 people. On the one hand, that’s a lot of people, but on the other hand, when I was growing up, that number always hovered around 400,000. That’s quite a drop-off. What does that make you think about God’s work or the health of the gospel? Do statistics like that leave you comforted or worried?
What is God doing? What is his plan? We might ask that about our work as a congregation or a church body. Paul might have asked that from the captivity he found himself in. The Colossians might have asked those questions as false teachers came trouncing all over the truth. Just what is God doing?
And, in a way, that question is starting to point in the right direction. What is God doing? Not, “What are we doing?” We do well to remember that the spread of the gospel is primarily God’s work, not ours. We are the ones scattering the seed while God makes it grow.
But we can take too much on ourselves. We can easily put ourselves in the place of God and say, “No, we need to do this work because we are on our own. Without us, God’s message will disappear!” A look at smaller congregations, shrinking church bodies, and nationally diminishing interest in Christianity can all lead to this line of thought, making us consider ourselves more important than we are. This line of thinking is often fueled by worry rather than trust.
Let’s take a moment to review some of the promises that God has made. He promised that his Word would never return to him empty but would do exactly what he sent it to do (Isaiah 55:10-11). He promised that his words would not disappear until he fulfilled every promise (Matthew 5:18). He promised that we don’t need large crowds to have his presence with us, that just two or three gathered together means he is present, and that he will not leave us even as individuals (Matthew 18:20; 28:20). Note who is doing the action in all of these promises: God, not us.
If we try to take on the responsibilities God has reserved for himself, we’re in trouble. And really, this is a summary of the entire gospel message, right? What is the message of the gospel? Jesus as Savior; not you, not me. My sacrifice and suffering don’t pay for my sins; only Jesus can and did do that. I can’t make myself believe or even choose to believe in Jesus as my Savior; only the Holy Spirit can and did do that. My entire spiritual health and eternal safety relies on God and on God alone.
And so it should be for our work as messengers of the gospel. We do well to see ourselves as mouthpieces sharing what God has done; we do well to see that God is the one doing the real work. And like a gardener watching the seeds sprout and plants begin to grow, we can look at the results of God’s actions. As Paul encouraged the Colossians, stop and notice that the gospel is bearing fruit and growing in the entire world, just as it also has been doing among you from the day you heard it and came to know the grace of God in truth.
While we don’t want to be focused on just the numbers, sometimes taking a step back and seeing the fruits of gospel ministry that God does let us see is worthwhile. Remember earlier when I said the North American membership in WELS churches is down to about 300,000? Well, the number of souls reached by our world mission work is at about 300,000—and growing! That means that sometime soon, the number of people reached with the gospel by our work outside of North America will be larger than that reached within our “home” borders. Praise God for the fruits of the gospel, that the message of Jesus as Savior is spreading far and wide!
What about our own work? We can take a peek at the statistics for our congregation’s webpage and see some interesting things. Do you know how many visits we’ve had from within California in the last month? About 350. Do you know how many people checked out our worship and education schedule? About 10-15.
But do you know how many visits we’ve had in total in the last month? Over 5500. Clearly, we don’t have 5500 people scrambling to attend worship with us in person each month. What is driving that traffic? Our archive of sermons and our clear confession of faith we have posted. And, in a way that almost seems to mirror our synod’s work as a whole, only a little over 40% of the traffic to our website came from North America. The rest came from across the world—the Philippines, India, Indonesia, South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, and England, to name a few.
I can assure you that the sermons on our website are not popular because they are so masterfully written—because they are not. But they are a tool God uses to share his truths with people worldwide, even from our little outpost here in God’s mission fields.
Where God sends his gospel, there will be fruit. What will the fruit look like? It may be a Penetcost-like mass conversation of a whole group of people. More likely, it will be the simple sustaining of the faith that God has given to his people—a remnant in this world—and the slow, individual, one-by-one leading of the sheep who are outside into his sheep pen.
And what about those times that we’ve worried that this might all disappear, where we haven’t trusted God to do the work he promised to do? Well, for that there is forgiveness. The very message we proclaim—that Jesus paid for all the sins of the whole world—assures you and me that we are forgiven for this worry and lack of proper focus and perspective.
So, my brothers and sisters, see the fruits the gospel is producing. Look around you and see the other people who are here this morning and care about God’s Word and his message of forgiveness. That only happens because God makes it happen. Rejoice that we are not alone, but join many within our church body and within the holy Christian church at large rejoicing in God’s forgiveness and looking forward to eternal life with him. And let us go out with confidence, both as a congregation and as individuals, to share this glorious good news of sins forgiven in Jesus and see God bring about that fruit through us.
Thanks be to God! Amen.
