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 letters 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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