Jesus: Knowledge and Wisdom

Introduction

So before we get started, I’d just like to point out the blaring irony that I am a 15 year old….. teaching on wisdom. I’ve only been around a little bit, so this morning I’m not going to rely on my own experiences and my personal encounters with wisdom and knowledge, but rather my goal is to take what the scriptures say about knowledge and wisdom in Christ, and deliver it in an organized, applicable way.

Colossians 2:1-7

Now in typical Pauline fashion, the entire 7 verses are only 4 english sentences, so there is definitely going to be continuity, or continuous ideas, that through verses. So lets start in verses 1 through 2, and we’ll go from there. (read it again) Now there is a TON of things that we can unpack here, but the central idea here is fellowship with other believers, so as we talk through the verses pay special attention to how this theme is hinted at.

The first thing we can notice here is Paul talks about this “great struggle” that he has for these people at Colossae and Laodicea, and if you remember from Caleb’s first lesson, there is some sort of false teaching going on in Colossae, though we aren’t exactly sure what this teaching was.

What’s interesting to me is that Paul has this struggle specifically for all of those who haven’t seen him face to face. This points to the means of grace-anybody heard of this term before? So the means of grace are basically how we are sanctified-how we are continually made more like Jesus. Some examples are reading your Bible, Prayer, communion, life groups, seeing baptisms-anybody get to see the baptisms last week? Yeah its always such a wonderful feeling seeing the power of the Gospel in that aspect. Paul Washer has a fantastic little book on the means of grace called “The Essential Means of Grace” which goes more in depth in this concept, but one of the means of grace-one of the ways we are sanctified is through hearing the word preached-hearing sermons and going to church.

Paul here is worried for the church, which is especially vulnerable to succumbing to false teachings because he has not been able to come to Colossae or Laodicea and preach & teach to them. Thankfully for Paul, he had Epaphras to let him know that the church was flourishing, and he was able to write this letter to exhort & teach the Colossians. But this really shows how important hearing the word preached is. I’m just gonna read real quick from Ephesians 4:11–14 which says:

“And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes.”

This passage really gives us more insight on how essential hearing the word preached is as Christians. Paul speaks of apostles and prophets, which of course we no longer have today, but we have their writings in the Bible.

He also speaks of evangelists which are essential to the spreading of the gospel, but what i really want to emphasize is the shepherds and the teachers. Shepherds could refer to many different people and offices, but some examples are our pastors, deacons, elders, Life group leaders for sure, spiritual mentors, really anyone who helps guide you spiritually. Paul writes here that through this how we :

are equipped for ministry, so how we are prepared to make disciples and how we live out our lives in a Christ like fashion each day

build up the body of Christ, so pastors and teachers are essential in the role of building up the church body and ensuring that the congregation is mature in their faith

Now i wanna skip to verse 13 & 14 real quick, where it says:

“until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, 14 so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes.”

So we see 2 sides of a coin here. On one side, we see someone who is being equipped for ministry, who is building up the body of Christ, someone who is reaching for unity with other Christians and striving to reach the fullness of Christ, or in other words someone who is striving for complete sanctification, becoming as much like Christ as possible.

On the flip side, we see someone that Paul bluntly describes as childish. Someone who is:

immature

isn’t making an effort to know their Bible,

doesn’t make an effort for fellowship with other believers, or to get involved in the church

Now, let me clarify something. While it is true that someone may not know their Bible super well, or may not be able to be the most active person in the church, or that someone may not have a lot of doctrine figured out, that doesn’t mean they are this person Paul is describing in verse 14. The person Paul is describing is someone who isn’t making an effort to grow as a Christian and be sanctified, or made more like Christ. Paul shows us this in verse 15, where he says:

Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ,

Paul here contrasts these 2 kinds of people, by saying that instead of being someone who is childish in their faith, we should be someone who is wanting to grow in all areas of life toward Christ. So if you maybe don’t know your Bible the best, or you haven’t gotten every part of Christianity figured out, first off, welcome to the club, but second off remember that searching the scriptures, studying the word, and learning from your shepherds and teachers are the most valuable thing you can do with your time. Paul Washer in his book The Essential Means of Grace writes:

Everyone seems to be unanimous regarding the necessity of the Word and prayer, and equally unanimous in admitting personal neglect of both. It has often been said by both ministers and laity, “I have never known of a dying believer who lamented that they had spent too much time in the Word of God and Prayer.”

So if you read verse 14 and thought, “that sounds an awful lot like me,” then praise the Lord because he has opened your eyes to an area in your life that you can improve. If you are realizing this describes you, then the first things you can do are:

pray and ask God that he would give you a desire for Christ,

attend church as often as you are able

Begin spending time in the word daily. This is such a critical thing for us as Christians, and we cannot expect to grow without doing this, because this is literally God’s direct revelation to us.

Now if you are thinking “wow I really’ve been neglecting my spiritual life lately.” what you shouldn’t do is go home and read 30 chapters and pray for 2 hours because this just isn’t sustainable. I know for me at least, my classes have been kinda picking up. It’s the time of year when homework begins to pile up and we all probably have assignments and tests, and for those of you in band or football or other extracurriculars, things are really starting to get busy.

I’m in some pretty work heavy classes so what I’ve been personally doing is every evening I’ll read through 1 chapter of the book I’m in (Matthew right now) then I’ll find something that really stood out to me or something that was especially powerful. Then what I’ll do is for as long as I can (usually about 7 minutes) I’ll meditate on the text and just thing about what this means for me, what are the implications of the texts, how can I better apply this in my life, things like that. Then I’ll read through a Psalm and just pray the Psalm. This is something I’ve found really powerful, because the Psalms are really just prayers. sometimes it’s hard to know what to pray, so praying the Psalms really helps with this. Then if I want to pray anything else I’ll do that. So thats just my routine for daily time in the word and in prayer.

Ok I know that may have seemed me going off on a really long tangent but I hope you at least got something out of that.

Alright verse 2! some of what we talked about should be echoed in these next verses so these should be a little bit faster. So verse 2 reads

English Standard Version Chapter 2

that 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,

Alright another very dense passage with a ton of stuff to unpack.

First thing: the word “heart” there means basically the core of your thoughts, desires, wants, and actions. So Paul wants us to be encouraged to our very inmost being by, and this is critical, being knit together in love. So what does that mean, being knit together in love? When paul talks about being ‘knit’ together, he is talking about unity between believers, and more specifically fellowship. This could look like your life group, Sunday mornings, or worship and prayer nights

So here Paul formulates an equation of sorts for us. He basically says that if have fellowship with one another and are united with deep familial love for one another, this will allow us to reach quote

“the riches of full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God’s mystery, which is Christ.”

Sounds pretty good to me right? So lets break this down. The greek word for full assurance here could also be translated as complete confidence, but what are we confident in? Paul says that it is

“full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God’s mystery, which is Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.”

So we have complete confidence in knowledge of Christ, who has all wisdom and knowledge. And again we find ourselves asking, what does this mean? Well, there are 2 main points we can get from this.

fellowship with other believers brings us assurance of salvation

Like we talked about with hearing the word preached, fellowship with other believers is also a means of grace. It is one of the ways that we are encouraged, as Paul says at the beginning of verse 2, and it is one of the ways that we are assured of our salvation in Jesus.

but this really just goes to show how important fellowship with believers, and honestly how powerful it can be. Spending meaningful, spiritual time with other believers is how we get - get this- literal confidence in eternal life, which is in Christ Jesus. I mean how amazing is that.

So think- Sunday mornings, Your life groups, things like that, I know sometimes we kinda push them to the side and maybe goof off sometimes, especially in life groups, I know I’m definitely guilty of that one, but I want us to put into perspective what we are actually neglecting when we do this. Deep, genuine, serious fellowship with other believers is so refreshing to the soul, and it is the key to finding rest and confidence in our hope of eternity, which is Christ.

So we talked about how fellowship with other believers brings us assurance of salvation, now the second idea seen here is that:

2. Jesus is both the means and the end of wisdom and knowledge.

Or in simpler terms, Christ is both how and why we get wisdom and knowledge.

But before we go any further, I think it’s important we understand what these words mean.

the word for wisdom in Greek is Sophia, which if you couldn’t tell is a common name today, and know you know what it means. So this word implies a sense of mastery over knowledge you have, or in other words knowing how to apply knowledge practically.

The word for knowledge in Greek is Gnosis, another popular name, and this word refers to literal head knowledge.

It is tempting to look at verse 3 and simply conclude that Jesus is full of spiritual wisdom and knowledge of God, which is absolutely true, but I wanna take it further than that. I believe that this passage says that Jesus is the only way that we can be sure of anything. To help illustrate this, can anyone answer the question “why do human beings have value?”

Now thing of the same question, but this time try answering it without using anything from the bible. You may find yourself coming up with something along the lines of “because society says they do” or “because they’re human” but does this really mean anything?

You see, without Christ humans are nothing more then highly evolved fish, and without Christ there is no reason for human beings to treat each other like anything more than clumps of cells.

Many of you in here probably go to public school, where they teach you that you evolved over billions of years from microorganisms and you are nothing more that bags of protoplasm, merely a result of a series of random events over millions of years. They tell you that as quickly as you lucked into this world, you will fade out as another meaningless roll of the dice in a meaningless universe that doesn’t care about you and will ultimately come to a meaningless end.

But Jesus says you are so much more than that. He says that you are his workmanship, created in imago dei, the likeness of God. Psalm 8 says

“what is man that you are mindful of him,

and the son of man that you care for him?

5  Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings

and crowned him with glory and honor.

6  You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;

you have put all things under his feet,”

You see it was for you that Jesus Christ humbled himself to a shameful death, it was for you that his body was broken, for you that his back was flayed.

It was for you that Jesus cried “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” It was for you that Jesus Christ drank the cup of wrath to its dregs.

for the sake of time we are gonna go to the last to verses of our passage today, which read,

Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, 7 rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving

What a beautiful encouragement this passage is. Because Christ is in you walk in him. Let Christ be our Rock of ages, and let us cling to him alone. May he be our only hope, our greatest joy, our great high Priest, our all satisfying peace, and our mighty savior.

I’d like to close with reading part of a hymn called “How can I Keep from Singing?”

What though my joys and comforts die? The Lord my Savior liveth What though the darkness gather round? Songs in the night he giveth.

No storm can shake my inmost calm While to that refuge clinging Since Christ is Lord of heaven and earth How can I keep from singing?

I lift my eyes, the cloud grows thin I see the blue above it And day by day this pathway smooths, Since first I learned to love it,

The peace of Christ makes fresh my heart A fountain ever springing! For all things are mine since I am his! How can I keep from singing?

No storm can shake my inmost calm While to that refuge clinging Since Christ is Lord of heaven and earth How can I keep from singing?