SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 12/14/2016 10:15 PM
My Worship Time Focus: P T-2 The Salutation
Bible Reading &
Meditation Reference: Colossians 1:1-2
Message of the verses: “1 Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the
will of God, and Timothy our brother, 2 To the saints and faithful brethren in
Christ who are at Colossae: Grace to you and peace from God our Father.”
When we
look at the letter found in the New Testament we see that they were written
different than we write them today. The
name of the person writing the letter is seen first and then included in this
letter and many other letters Paul wrote is mentioned a person who was with him
when he wrote the letter, and in this case it was Timothy. Again perhaps people to whom he is writing to
knew Timothy.
Now I want
to think for a moment about Paul, and one thing that is true that he was the
most important and most influential person in history since our Lord Jesus
Christ. If a person today had the
opportunity to read one letter from this man that would be a real privilege but
we have the opportunity to read thirteen letters written by him, fourteen that
are found in our New Testament. Paul was
not only a brilliant man, but he probably was the one who was the most godly
person who ever lived with of course the exception of our Lord Jesus
Christ. Paul was a man who was Jewish,
but also was a Roman Citizen, something that was very helpful for him in his
travels for the cause of Christ. Now if
one thinks about their spiritual ancestry Paul’s name is most probably in it as
he was humanly responsible for starting the majority of the Gentile churches in
the first century. He may have not
started all of them, but his fingerprints are on most of them that were
started. MacArthur writes “Such a
background rendered him uniquely qualified to communicate the gospel in the
Greco-Roman world. It was largely his
efforts that transformed Christianity from a small Palestinian sect to a
religion with adherents throughout the Roman Empire.”
We mention
his apostleship in our last SD, and that is important for us to understand that
Christ called him to be an apostle as we seen in this salutation when he writes
“by the will of God.” You can see this
in Acts 9:1-9 when God called Him while on the road to Damascus.
As
mentioned earlier Paul mentions his son in the Lord Timothy when he writes “Timothy
our brother.” The New Testament has a
lot to say about Timothy from when he became a believer throughout much of his
life we find in the NT letters, including the book of Acts. Timothy was a fragile person who was timid,
but I believe did much for the early church as we can see in the two letters that
Paul wrote to him. In fact the very last
letter that Paul wrote that is recorded in the NT was written to Timothy.
John
MacArthur concludes his writing on the salutation of this letter by writing “Paul
addresses his readers as the saints and faithful brethren…who are at
Colossae. Saints and faithful brethren are
not distinct groups; the terms are equivalent.
And “kai) could be translated,
‘even.’ Hagios, which translates ‘saints,’ refers to separation, in this
case being separated from sin and set apart to God. ‘Faithful’ notes the very source of that
separation—saving faith. Believing
saints are the only true saints. ‘Grace
to you and peace’ was the greeting Paul used to open all thirteen of his
letters. Inasmuch as God is the source
of both, Paul says those two blessings derive from our great God and Father.”
Paul calls
the believers, all the believers at Colossae “saints” and this means that all
true believers in Jesus Christ are saints.
I now want
to quote from a sermon that John MacArthur preached in 1976 on the introduction
to Colossians and the part I want to quote has to do with the word “saint”
“Do you
know what a saint is? You say - Oh, yes, they're those ones that they have
statues of. No...the word saint, just to give you, this is maybe coming at it
from a little different angle, I know you're familiar with...but I don't want
to say what you already know, I want to say what maybe you haven't thought of ... the word
saint in the original Greek, listen to this now, has no ethical or moral meaning at all. It has no
righteous character in its terminology. It has no moral significance, it has no
ethical significance, and
it simply means set apart one ... a separated one. We speak of a church as a holy
place. Now, that doesn't mean that the brick and the stone and the wood has
some kind of ethical quality, it doesn't mean this is moral mortar. No. What it
means is its holy only in the sense that this has been set apart for the use of
God's people. We speak of the Bible so often and we say the "Holy
Book." The paper is not ethically different than any other paper, and the
ink doesn't have any moral quality at all, but when we say it's a Holy Book, we
mean of all the books in the world this book has been set aside as the one
single book through which God conveyed His truth. It's set apart from all other
books. We come to the Lord's table sometime and we take the bread and we say -
"This is holy bread." Well, it isn't any different than any other
ordinary bread, but it has been set apart as a symbol of Jesus Christ. Holy
simply means set apart. You know what a Christian is? He's holy. That does not make,
necessarily, an ethical or moral statement about him; it simply says he has
been set apart from the world of ordinary people to belong to God. Now whether
or not he is genuinely holy is something that has to be examined-to see whether
he's living up to the fact that he is set apart.”
12/14/2016 10:46 PM
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