The Importance of Community Pt. 2
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Introduction
Introduction
Good morning and welcome to Dishman Baptist Church.
At one point I considered referring to this section as Paul’s groupies but that wouldn’t be the best way to refer to these men. Unlike the modern popular preachers and those in ministry who seem to develop cults of personality, the first century accounts would provide us a warning against thinking that following Christianity because it is the “popular” thing is maybe an unhealthy idea.
In the early days of the church the disciples were gaining a popular standing with the people of the city because of their generosity and sharing with one another. One named Barnabas had sold property and given it to the church. The very next story we find in the Bible is about a couple who wanted to join in and get some of the notoriety that Barnabas had for his generosity. We don’t really have a good description of how all of this sharing of all things played out in daily life, but Ananias and Sapphira wanted to be recognized - and so they lied and as a result experienced the only instantaneous Old Testament style justice of God in the entire New Testament.
Then later in Acts as the Gospel spreads out from Jerusalem into Samaria a man named Simon is tagging along with first Phillip and then Peter and John and is greatly impressed by their ability to impart the Holy Spirit on people by the laying on of hands. He asks for this ability and even offers to pay Peter for it. You would think that someone who told a beggar “silver and gold I don’t have” might be willing to take donations when they come. But Peter instead tells Simon
But Peter told him, “May your silver be destroyed with you, because you thought you could obtain the gift of God with money!
You have no part or share in this matter, because your heart is not right before God.
Therefore repent of this wickedness of yours, and pray to the Lord that, if possible, your heart’s intent may be forgiven.
For I see you are poisoned by bitterness and bound by wickedness.”
In each of those instances it was God purging His church of unholy influences - I think He may care about the condition and image of His church. And then add to that a culture that was bent on keeping the new movement of the church in its place and not letting it gain too much momentum with the new teachings that seemed to subvert, if only ideologically, the Pax Romana - the Roman peace.
So these men that were with Paul in Rome were not there because it was the popular or comfortable thing to do. They were there because they cared deeply about the mission that they had been called to fulfill. This in itself is a lesson for us. As it becomes less and less popular and acceptable to be a Christian in our society where will you stand? It encourages us to follow through on what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 13:5
Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith. Examine yourselves. Or do you yourselves not recognize that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless you fail the test.
Or that Peter writes in 2 Peter 1:10
Therefore, brothers and sisters, make every effort to confirm your calling and election, because if you do these things you will never stumble.
We, each of us as individuals, needs to make sure that we came to the Christianity of the Bible and not some other slightly altered version and that we are in the faith. That we didn’t come to Christ for the benefits of salvation without seeking the Savior who provides those benefits. That we aren’t doing what was once popular and has now become just another habit because should persecution come, should we like these men face the prospect of jail time or other persecution for our faith - if we came to the faith because it was the popular thing, if we are band-wagon Christians then we will fall away.
And in light of our current culture there is much that we can learn both from the way that Paul talks about these men and from the men that he chooses to highlight.
Please open your Bibles with me and turn to Colossians 4. We’ll be looking at verses 10-14 today.
Aristarchus, my fellow prisoner, sends you greetings, as does Mark, Barnabas’s cousin (concerning whom you have received instructions: if he comes to you, welcome him),
and so does Jesus who is called Justus. These alone of the circumcised are my coworkers for the kingdom of God, and they have been a comfort to me.
Epaphras, who is one of you, a servant of Christ Jesus, sends you greetings. He is always wrestling for you in his prayers, so that you can stand mature and fully assured in everything God wills.
For I testify about him that he works hard for you, for those in Laodicea, and for those in Hierapolis.
Luke, the dearly loved physician, and Demas send you greetings.
Those of the Circumcision
Those of the Circumcision
What little we know of Aristarchus in Scripture tells us that he was one of those people that trouble just found. It’s a little like the advice I got from someone when I moved up here and he was counseling me on how to survive a bear attack. He said you have to be “just fast enough”. I said just fast enough to outrun a bear? He said no - just fast enough to outrun whoever is with you.
We first meet Aristarchus in Acts 19 in Ephesus.
So the city was filled with confusion, and they rushed all together into the amphitheater, dragging along Gaius and Aristarchus, Macedonians who were Paul’s traveling companions.
Aristarchus gets caught up in the riot that happened as a result of Paul preaching the Gospel in Ephesus and the threat to the local religious practices there. He is also in Acts 27and he’s in trouble again.
When we had boarded a ship of Adramyttium, we put to sea, intending to sail to ports along the coast of Asia. Aristarchus, a Macedonian of Thessalonica, was with us.
Paul, in Colossians calls Aristarchus his fellow prisoner. Whether Aristarchus is actually a prisoner alongside Paul or he calls him a prisoner to emphasize that he is a brother in Christ is unclear. The word used for prisoner here is generally used to refer to those who are prisoners of war. What is evident from what Paul writes of him is that he had a concern for both Paul and the Colossians.
While the information surrounding Aristarchus is mostly speculation it is evident that he had a prior relationship with Paul and that he volunteered or was commandeered to travel to Rome with Paul possibly to be a help to him. Prison in the first century did not include the three square meals, a cot and a work out yard like prisons have today. It was a lonely existence and the funds for supporting the prisoner were the prisoner’s or his family’s responsibility. Aristarchus may have volunteered to travel with Paul, much like Luke had, to help care for his needs.
The other is that he sent his greetings to the Colossians. It is possible that he was known to the church but either way he sends his greetings and concern for their welfare alongside Paul.
Of the people that Paul writes about we have the most information about Mark. Mark is introduced in Scripture early on in the story of the church when Peter is released from prison in Acts 12 and he heads to Mark’s mother’s house. Here, Paul tells us that Mark is Barnabas’s cousin which explains some of the other information surrounding Mark. On Paul’s first missionary journey Mark was a part of the team along with his cousin. But Mark left early and this leads to a rift between Paul and Barnabas when the time comes for a second missionary journey.
There are many people in the Bible that we would like to identify with - like the Apostle Paul. I mean who wouldn’t want to be identified as arguably the second most important person in all of human history. As the writer of half the New Testament. As a man’s man. I mean the guy was stoned outside of Lystra and left for dead and what does he do - he gets up and walks back in to town. The Apostle Paul was the original Chuck Norris - and if you don’t understand that reference just ask me after service and I’ll explain it. But he is so far up there that we can only aspire to identify with him - at least that’s how I see him.
Mark is a little easier for me to identify with. He demonstrated weakness. He was a person who had all the right pedigree and so of course he should have been chosen by Paul and Barnabas to accompany them on their first journey. He was raised in a Christian home. He was exposed to the Apostle Peter. By many accounts from church history he was the lad who fled naked on the night that Christ was arrested (Mark 14:50-51).
Mark’s initially failure in ministry was a case of right calling, wrong time. I can identify with him as I was a young man, raised in a Christian home and slated to go into the ministry in 1994. In fact I was three weeks away from going to school. But as I considered what I was about to do I realized (and this is both a mature and an immature realization) that I wasn’t doing a good job of maintaining my own salvation how was I supposed to be responsible for maintaining a whole church’s salvation? It was mature because it was very self-aware. It was immature because it wasn’t very spiritually aware. See what I failed to realize, and what thankfully by God’s grace I recognize now, is that I don’t maintain my own spirituality or salvation. Christ does all of that. I have to put in effort, true - Philippians 2:12 tells us that - but Christ through the Spirit maintains and grows my spiritual life. But my 21 year old self didn’t recognize that yet and so I walked away from that - and I’m sure that many looked at me the way that Paul looked at Mark.
But God wasn’t done with Mark (and thankfully by His grace He wasn’t done with me either). Exactly how it happened no one is sure but Mark ended up in Rome and came into contact with the Apostle Peter (much of his Gospel is attributed to Peter as Mark’s “source”). Their relationship became quite close. Peter refers to Mark in 1 Peter 5
She who is in Babylon, chosen together with you, sends you greetings, as does Mark, my son.
And so Mark - the young man who was a coward and always running away - when the time was right became not only Peter’s son in the faith but also was reconciled to Paul such that he would be with Paul as he wrote this epistle and the epistle to Philemon (Philemon 24) but that Paul would actually send for Mark later in his ministry (2 Timothy 4:11)
Only Luke is with me. Bring Mark with you, for he is useful to me in the ministry.
And not only send for him but choose to have him near during the last days of his life. But at this moment in time it seems likely that Paul was about to dispatch Mark to Colossae maybe to shore up the groundwork that had been laid by this letter. He makes a cryptic comment at the end of this section regarding Mark that the Colossians had received instructions regarding Mark and that they should welcome him when he comes. I think that it is very possible that Paul was going to dispatch Mark to Colossae (just as he would dispatch Timothy to Philippi as promised in that book) but that he couldn’t afford to do it just yet and so he had sent Tychicus and Onesimus ahead of him.
Mark’s story is one of the great redemption stories of the Bible and it is an example for each of us that although it may seem we have a calling on our lives we need to wait for the Lord’s timing to execute that calling.
The final member of this trio is Jesus called Justus. If we know very little about Aristarchus, we know less than nothing about this man. Twice previously in the New Testament is the name Justus mentioned. The first is in Acts 1 when the Apostles were seeking a replacement for Judas
So they proposed two: Joseph, called Barsabbas, who was also known as Justus, and Matthias.
And then later in Acts a man from Corinth is called by this name
So he left there and went to the house of a man named Titius Justus, a worshiper of God, whose house was next door to the synagogue.
Whether this man that Paul now mentions is either of these men is lost to the annuls of church history. What we can glean from the text is that this man was with Paul in Rome, that he was Jewish (which probably rules out the man from Corinth) and that he is concerned about the Colossians enough that he sends his greetings.
The Non-Circumcised Servants
The Non-Circumcised Servants
Paul shifts his attention now to the another group of men that are with him. We have more information regarding these three men than we did about the previous group.
He starts out saying that Epaphras, who is one of you, a servant of Christ Jesus greets you. And this would really seem like such an obvious statement that Paul shouldn’t even spend time making it. It was Epaphras who had left the church in Colossae to go to Paul and bring to him the concerns of what was happening there. It was Epaphras who was the diligent servant that Paul referenced at the beginning of the book saying this
because of the hope reserved for you in heaven. You have already heard about this hope in the word of truth, the gospel
that has come to you. It is bearing fruit and growing all over the world, just as it has among you since the day you heard it and came to truly appreciate God’s grace.
You learned this from Epaphras, our dearly loved fellow servant. He is a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf,
and he has told us about your love in the Spirit.
Epaphras, their teacher and preacher, their church planter was sending them greetings. Of course he would be. But Paul is saying so much more here than simply conveying that one of their own was sending greetings. Paul calls Epaphras a servant of Christ Jesus applying to him the moniker - doulos - that he only uses in the New Testament to refer to four people - himself, Timothy, Tychicus and here to Epaphras. He is elevating Epaphras’ status in the eyes of the Colossians to put him on the same level as himself as their spiritual father. He continues to do this in the way that he describes how Epaphras demonstrates his concern for the Colossians.
He says that Epaphras is always wrestling for you in his prayers. This reflects back on Paul’s description of his own ministry in Colossians 1:29 where he said
I labor for this, striving with his strength that works powerfully in me.
Epaphras toils, he wrestles in his prayers for the Colossian believers. We might naturally think back to Jacob wrestling with the unnamed man (who is a picture of Christ) through the night, striving to overcome him. Here Epaphras is wrestling against the false teachings that are coming against the Colossians, his beloved church, as Paul describes our fight in Ephesians 6
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this darkness, against evil, spiritual forces in the heavens.
And in 2 Corinthians 10:3-5
For although we live in the flesh, we do not wage war according to the flesh,
since the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but are powerful through God for the demolition of strongholds. We demolish arguments
and every proud thing that is raised up against the knowledge of God, and we take every thought captive to obey Christ.
Even separated from the church that he loved Epaphras was not out on holiday or sabbatical but was continuing to struggle for the church against the spiritual attacks that were coming against it. And his desires are also a mirror image of Paul’s desires for the Colossians.
We proclaim him, warning and teaching everyone with all wisdom, so that we may present everyone mature in Christ.
Paul states that his desire is to present everyone mature in Christ - this is a desire that we have adopted here at Dishman as our mission as well. But in our text, Paul highlights that Epaphras is wrestling in prayer for the Colossians with the same desire in mind. His desire is to see the church that he planted mature and grow to be fully assured in what God wills. We know from other places in Scripture that the two things that God desires are for believers to be confident that they have been saved through faith in Christ (the entire book of 1 John is written just for this purpose) and that they would be sanctified (1 Thessalonians 4:3).
Paul gives us one last characteristic of Epaphras that is very important for us today. He says that he struggles, that he toils, that he works hard not only for the church in Colossae, but also the church in Laodicea and in Hieropolis. We’re going to talk more about these churches next week when we close out this letter - but the important thing for us to grasp is that for Epaphras the Gospel was not simply about local impact. Someone recently told me that the greatest thing about Southern Baptist churches is that we are all autonomous churches. Then he said that the worst thing about Southern Baptist churches is that we are all autonomous churches. We were talking in the context of a church here in town that is having some struggles and what we as a Convention might be able to do about it. But here’s the question for us here at Dishman Baptist this morning - do we ever pray for the other churches in Spokane Valley? Do we ever open up the Inland Empire Baptist Association’s website and pray through the list of our sister churches? Or are we only focused on what’s happening here at Dishman and are unaware that there’s any other churches that are having struggles? We need to pray hard for our sister churches in the area. For Greenacres Baptist, for Valleypoint, for Driscoll Baptist churches. I could go on. Epaphras here shows us that we cannot be focused only on our own little part of the field and not be concerned about what’s happening in the parcel next to us.
The next person that Paul highlights is another well known, well loved figure in the New Testament. Luke is well known to anyone who has ever watched the Peanuts Christmas special. He stands as the most significant chronicler of the New Testament second only to Paul. He is the historian who gave us a Gospel and then a carefully detailed record of the early days of the church. Yet it is only here, in the greeting of Philemon and in 2 Timothy that he is ever mentioned explicitly by name. How Luke came to be a traveling companion of Paul’s is a mystery.
What can be said is that he joined on with Paul sometime during his second missionary journey. The narrative portion of the book of Acts is in the third person until Paul in in Macedonia in Acts 16 and then it changes to a second person narrative for much of the rest of that book. It is also revealed here for us that Luke is a physician. This could have been why Luke was a part of Paul’s entourage. In Galatians Paul divulges that he had some medical issues saying that they would have given him their very eyes (Galatians 4:15). So Luke could have become Paul’s personal physician. Or he may have sought out Paul as a part of his efforts to carefully catalogue the actions of the early church and Paul took center stage following the events of the Jerusalem council.
Whatever led Luke to become a part of Paul’s team he was an integral part all the way up until the end of Paul’s life. The mention of Luke in 2 Timothy says
Only Luke is with me. Bring Mark with you, for he is useful to me in the ministry.
This was written during Paul’s second imprisonment and as he neared the time of his execution. By maintaining close proximity to the apostle Paul, Luke would have grown to share with him the burdens he had for the churches and so he would also have shared the burden that Paul had for the Colossians.
The last person that Paul mentions is Demas. He again is a man that the New Testament doesn’t choose to tell us much about. We know two things regarding Demas - that he is here with Paul at the writing of this letter and that later in Paul’s life Demas forsakes him for the things of the world.
because Demas has deserted me, since he loved this present world, and has gone to Thessalonica. Crescens has gone to Galatia, Titus to Dalmatia.
Demas stands as a cautionary tale that we should be careful who we place into roles of ministry because - as our denomination is learning all too painfully right now - there are some who would deceive us and not forsake their love of this world.
Can’t We Just Get Along?
Can’t We Just Get Along?
But the question is why do these men matter to us today? Why is their inclusion in this letter important for us? In the first century Paul only has one other time where he lists this many (and actually more) believers or fellow workers at the end of a letter and this is to the Romans. In each case it would seem that Paul is supporting his credibility by marking those who were around him. But we are two thousand years beyond that. We have the whole cannon of Scripture and we know that Paul’s credibility is pretty rock solid.
We live in a fractured world. As our world becomes increasingly post-Christian we see more and more divisions in society. We are divided politically. We are divided over ethnic differences (I refuse to categorize us as different races because we all descend from the same man - Adam) and the amount of melanin we have in our skin. We are divided over gender, sexual orientation, economic status, abortion, the kind of car you drive. Everything is about diversity.
Now we could look at this passage of Scripture and say “look how diverse the Apostle Paul was - he highlighted the fact that he had three of the circumcision and three Gentiles with him”. But in doing so we would miss the point of Paul’s overall message - we would miss the proverbial forest by focusing on a single tree. And we do that with another passage that demonstrates this topic - in Revelation there is the beautiful picture of the throng gathered around the throne of God
After this I looked, and there was a vast multitude from every nation, tribe, people, and language, which no one could number, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were clothed in white robes with palm branches in their hands.
We look at this verse and we highlight the vast multitude from every nation, tribe, people and language and we emphasize how diverse life will be in Heaven. But again we miss the point if we only see the diversity of the multitude and don’t recognize the unifying factor that brought all of them there. No one stands before the throne on that day because of their nation, tribe, people or language. They all stand there because of the unity of the Gospel. The stand there because they have redeemed out of diversity and brought into unity in the Gospel.
And Paul is making the same case here. This passage is not Paul’s Affirmative Action statement for his ministry. Even in mentioning that the first three - Aristarchus, Mark and Justus - are the only members of the circumcision is more to highlight that all the other Jews in Rome had abandoned him rather than to point to the diverse group that he had assembled. This is the same man who wrote earlier in the letter in chapter 3
In Christ there is not Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all.
and also in Galatians 3:28
There is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female; since you are all one in Christ Jesus.
In fact if you look back in Scripture at the source of diversity, the real root cause, it is the sin of the people at the tower of Babel that resulted in the scattering of the nations and the confusion of languages. Christ is the unifying factor that removes all the distinctions that we put on ourselves.
Now what am I saying? Am I saying that we should be color blind and not recognize the differences in cultures, languages or even skin color. No. What I am saying is that we shouldn’t use man made and man centered ideologies like Critical Race Theory (the idea that racial inequality emerges from social, economic and legal differences that white people create between races to maintain elite white interest that give rise to poverty and criminality in many minority communities) or Intersectionality (the theory that the overlap of various social identities, as race, gender, sexuality and class, contributes to the specific type of systemic oppression and discrimination experienced by and individual) and simply apply the Gospel. It is as Charles Spurgeon once said “There are in truth but two denominations upon this earth - the church and the world.”
Paul highlights these men in our text this morning not for anything inherently wonderful in them nor to demonstrate the diversity of his ministry - he highlights each of them because of their commitment to the cause of Christ and the preaching of the Gospel. That is the unifying element for all of these men and it should be the unifying element for us as well.
The only question should be what are you going to do with Christ?
Conclusion
Conclusion