Colleen and Nikki discuss the first part of chapter four of Colossians. Paul teaches the importance of prayer and being wise in the way we interact with “outsiders”. Transcription by Gwen Billington.
Colleen: Welcome to Former Adventist podcast. I’m Colleen Tinker.
Nikki: And I’m Nikki Stevenson.
Colleen: Today we are continuing our journey through the epistle to the Colossians, and we’ll be looking at chapter 4, verses 2 through 6. We’re going to talk about Paul’s instructions regarding prayer and the ways we interact with outsiders. But first, if you have questions or comments, please write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com. We appreciate the emails that we have received already, and we’re always happy to interact with you regarding your questions, your concerns, and your reactions. You may also like to sign up for our weekly Proclamation! email at proclamationmagazine.com, and you can donate to Life Assurance Ministries there as well, to help support this podcast and all the other Former Adventist ministries that we do. And don’t forget to follow us on Instagram and Facebook, and please give us a 5-star review wherever you listen to this podcast if you like it. Now, before we launch into our passage today, we have a little bit of correcting to do. A few weeks ago we made the statement that Moses, not God, wrote the second set of commandments on the second tables of stone after Moses broke the first one, and we based that on Exodus 34:27 and 28, and here’s what that passage says: “And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Write these words, for in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel.’ So he was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights. He neither ate bread nor drank water. And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, the Ten Commandments.” Besides the fact that that text clearly identifies the Ten Commandments as the actual words of the Mosaic covenant, it also suggests very strongly that Moses wrote that second set of tablets, and that’s what Nikki and I were referring to.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: But then, one of our listeners wrote to us and pointed out that Exodus 34:1 has God telling Moses to cut a second set of stone tablets and that God then says, “I will write on the tablets the words that were on the former tablets, which you shattered.” So Nikki and I were duly concerned, and we went back to Scripture, and Nikki found that Deuteronomy 10:4 completely settles the problem. God did write those second stones. Here’s what Deuteronomy 10:4 says, “And He wrote on the tablets, in the same writing as before, the Ten Commandments that the Lord had spoken to you on the mountain out of the midst of the fire on the day of the assembly. And the Lord gave them to me.” Now, that’s Moses speaking, and he clearly says that God, “He,” wrote the Ten Commandments on that second set of stones. So it turns out that there is some confusion and disagreement about this subject because the grammar in Exodus 34:27 and 28 is so clear that Moses wrote them. But Deuteronomy settles the question, so we want to thank the person that wrote to us and asked us about our conclusion, and we always hope that all of you will be Bereans and will investigate what you hear.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Don’t take our word for anything. Go to God’s word, go to Scripture. Everything you believe, everything we believe, must be grounded in God’s word. And we do pray that the Lord will always show us what’s actually in His word and that He’ll help us speak rightly, and we thank Him for sending people to ask questions if something we say is confusing.
Nikki: Absolutely.
Colleen: God’s word actually says the truth, and we just wanted to tell you that one of you helped us see something we had missed. Thank you, and we stand corrected. So now we’re going to go to Colossians 4:2-6, and before we read the text, Nikki, I want to start by asking you: How did you look at prayer as an Adventist?
Nikki: Prayer was something that really confused me as an Adventist. I think that the best way to sum it up was to say that I felt like my ability to pray had everything to do with my momentary standing before God. I didn’t feel like I could consistently go before Him with requests, with concerns, with petitions because I never knew if I was in or out with Him. I didn’t know if I was holding onto sin in my heart that was going to prevent Him from responding to me. I was afraid to approach Him. I didn’t know what He thought about me. And I also had this idea that I went to Him to ask for things, and then if I didn’t get what I asked for, then that was some kind of an indication that I was messing up somehow. And in order to obtain what I wanted from Him, I had to have an adequate amount of faith, and I had to have a holy enough lifestyle. If anything was missing in those two areas, then either He wouldn’t hear my prayers or I was being disciplined. I didn’t rightly understand the nature of prayer, why God commanded us to do it. I didn’t understand why He would say, “You have not because you ask not,” but then I’d ask, and I’d still not have. It was very confusing.
Colleen: I so understand that. And you know, I think there’s a good reason why you had that reaction to prayer. I had a similar one myself. I decided to look up some Ellen White quotes about prayer, and believe me, the woman wrote a lot about prayer. Almost ad nauseam about prayer. And she always had different things to say but always prayer was connected to, just like you said, to our attitude and to our heart, that somehow we were responsible for the way our prayers were answered. Here are just a few quotes that might help people understand where this subliminal, imprecise sense that how we feel and relate to God is responsible for how our prayers are answered, where this came from. Now, one of the most common quotes I heard from Ellen White about prayer was this, “Prayer is the opening of the heart to God as to a friend.” I can’t even tell you how often I heard that growing up, from teachers especially. Then she goes on. This is from her Testimonies for the Church, Volume 4: “The eye of faith will discern God very near, and the suppliant may obtain precious evidence of the divine love and care for him,” and I want to say, that’s gobbledygook. I hardly even know how to even understand what she’s saying. First of all, “Prayer is the opening of the heart to God as to a friend”? Well, for whom? For a person who is dead in their sin? They’re not friends of God. For me, as a born-again believer now, well, maybe, but God is still God, and prayer is something that God asks us to do as believers, not for the sake of just having chitchat with a friend. So there’s something about that whole presentation that seems off to me. And it always made me feel guilty as an Adventist. I could feel my eyes glazing over when I heard somebody quote this. And then here’s another quote: “If we regard iniquity in our hearts, if we cling to any known sin, the Lord will not hear us. But the prayer of the penitent, contrite soul is always accepted. When all known wrongs are righted, we may believe that God will answer our petitions. Our own merit will never commend us to the favor of God. It is the worthiness of Jesus that will save us, His blood that will cleanse us, yet we have a work to do in complying with the conditions of acceptance.” What on earth is she saying? She’s speaking out of both sides of her mouth in that quote. She’s both saying God saves us, Jesus’ righteousness is what cleanses us, and she’s also saying we have something to do in complying with the conditions of our acceptance, and I want to say, woman, just stop talking. You’ve confused millions of people, and we just need to put a lid on all this because it’s not addressing what the Bible says about prayer.
Nikki: Well, and that phrase she says, “If all known wrongs are righted, we may believe our prayers will be answered.” I’ve never read that, but that was the sense I had. And so I remember very vividly walking, pacing through the hospital during the midnight hours when my five-week-old son was admitted for meningitis, and praying and praying and praying that God would heal him and preserve his life, and he would remain sick, he’d get sicker. We’d find new problems with him. It was a very difficult time. And I would confess every sin I could think of. I would plead with Him to forgive me for my foolish years before I had been married and had a family and when I was a teenager, and I felt like I was being punished, my son was being punished, because I wasn’t confessing something properly. It was terrible. And I didn’t think I knew how to confess my sins. I didn’t think I knew how to repent, because I was trying, and it wasn’t working, and it was absolutely crazy-making, and people would come visit me, Adventist pastors, Adventist family, and their response to me would be, “just have faith.”
Colleen: Oh! I hate that.
Nikki: Yeah. And I thought, I don’t have enough faith. I can’t heal my kid.
Colleen: So, Nikki, why don’t we go from that miserable reality that we both had as Adventists regarding prayer and read these verses, and we’ll walk through them and talk a little bit about it. As we do this, we will unpack how we thought of prayer as Adventists and how we see prayer from the light of Scripture as true children of God. So would you mind reading those verses, 2 through 6?
Nikki: “Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving. At the same time, pray also for us, that God may open to us a door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ, on account of which I am in prison – that I may make it clear, which is how I ought to speak. Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of the time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person.”
Colleen: It’s so interesting to read this now, not as an Adventist. Because as an Adventist this just seemed like one more litany of things I had to do. I always – every command in the Bible was for me, and I had to do it to be worthy. But now, reading this, it looks completely different. That very first verse, my NASB says, “Devote yourselves to prayer, keeping alert in it with an attitude of thanksgiving.” Who is Paul talking to here, Nikki?
Nikki: He’s talking to the church at Colossae.
Colleen: He’s talking to people who already are standing in a very big indicative. They are believers. They have been born again. And I want to say, seeing this verse from the perspective of a born-again, believing child of God, saved by the blood of Jesus, indwelt by the Holy Spirit, this verse looks different than it looked to me as an Adventist. I didn’t understand what it meant to know that God would answer prayer based on the infallibility of His promises, and I didn’t understand what it meant to devote myself to prayer. What do you think when you read this, Nikki? You were looking up some of the words, and you had some really interesting insights. Could you talk about that a bit?
Nikki: Yeah, so from the beginning, that “devote yourself” or “continue steadfastly,” the Greek there, according to Bible Hub, means to continue to do something with intense effort, with the possible implication of despite difficulty. So it’s implied in the command to be devoted to it and to continue steadfastly that there may be obstacles to doing what you’re told to do. When I saw that, that was so helpful to me because I can’t tell you how many times I have been asked by other people or I have wondered myself what is the point in praying if it’s not going to be answered? For example, when we recently had the Eldorado fire nearby, I prayed every night. I would go outside when I would let my dogs out, and I would pray that God would spare the firefighters, and a firefighter did lose his life in that fire, and I had to remind myself that it’s God’s will when we go home. He’s in charge of all things, and we are to pray, we’re commanded to pray, but I had to talk myself through submitting to God’s choice in that, submitting to His will, and knowing that that wasn’t futile. I was doing what I was told to do, and in doing that, every day I was caring about and loving those firefighters and their families and their children, and it was changing me.
Colleen: That is such a good point, Nikki. What I’m seeing now is that devoting ourselves to prayer, being alert, with an attitude of thanksgiving, is something only a born-again person can do, and it actually – when you talk about this, when you talk about this business of submitting our will to the Lord so that His will will become our will, it makes me think of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, the ultimate example of that. He knew why He came. It was the plan laid from the foundation of the world. It was not an afterthought. He knew He came to die for our sins. And yet when He came right up to that night He was arrested, He knelt in the Garden of Gethsemane and pleaded with His Father that if it were possible that that cup pass from Him, that God would allow it to pass from Him. Even though He knew.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And yet, He said, “Not my will but thine be done.” Now, that is not something a person who is not alive in Christ even can do. It makes no sense.
Nikki: Yeah, that was really interesting to see that even in just the definition of the word “pray,” the Greek word there – if you had asked me what “prayer” meant, I would have said, talking to God, and certainly that’s a part of it. But the Greek word there, according to Bible Hub, means to interact with the Lord by switching human desire or ideas for His, and in that process, He imparts faith to us. Praying and interacting with our Father in that indicative is a part of this process of knowing our God and being changed by our God.
Colleen: The passage in Ephesians 6 helps me understand this even better. We’ve talked before about the fact that Paul wrote Colossians and Ephesians at about the same time, and the churches had these letters delivered in similar timeframes and were to share the letters with each other. So it’s not inappropriate to look at Ephesians 6:10-20 and to see what Paul says there because when he talks in his letter to the Ephesians about praying always, like he says here in Colossians, “devote yourselves to prayer,” that’s like a deep commitment that never ends. When he talks about that in Ephesians, he explains the indicative in which we stand in order to do that, and that helps me so much to understand what he means when he says, “devote yourselves to prayer.” I’m going to just read it, Ephesians 6:10-20: “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of His might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore, take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm. Stand therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and as shoes for your feet, having put on the readiness given by the gospel of peace; in all circumstances, take up the shield of faith with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end, keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints, and also for me, that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains; that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak.” Isn’t that interesting, that he actually says essentially the same thing as he says in Colossians?
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: The kind of prayer he wants for himself. But he makes it really clear that the people he is talking to are born again, and the indicatives are all the results of salvation. First of all, he says, “having fastened on the belt of truth.” The believer has fastened on truth. And you know, Nikki, when I think about what we came from, out of Adventism, that is the biggest, most huge hurdle we take is realizing that we have to give up everything we thought was truth and let God retrain our minds and hearts through His word. It was a shock to me to discover that Adventism was the world out of which God was calling me. I had to reject it. I grew up hearing, “We have to leave the world and follow Christ,” and then the shock to discover that Adventism was that world I had to leave. It’s all related to that belt of truth.
Nikki: And it’s been surprising to me, as we’ve been walking through this passage and as we talked before we started recording, that even our concept of prayer and the purpose of prayer has had to be completely replaced with a biblical perspective, a biblical purpose. You were sharing a little bit about what motivated your prayers as an Adventist. Would you mind sharing that?
Colleen: No, not at all. As an Adventist, I spent an enormous amount of my life asking God to make me good and to forgive my sin. I was actually pretty obsessive-compulsive as a child, always worrying that every little thing I did was putting me out of sorts with God. I was so obsessive-compulsive about repentance and forgiveness and confessing my sins that everything I did almost, made me want to ask God to forgive me, and if people looked at me, they thought I was probably a pretty odd child because they could see my lips moving, and they thought I was talking to myself, but I was actually always praying that God would forgive me, wringing my hands, praying. I was really a mess. When I think back on how it was as a pre-teen, it was pretty awful. But I never believed I was right with God. I never believed I was forgiven, and every time I turned around, there I was with another emotion that I knew was sinful or another rationalization in my head that I knew was a partial lie to my mother, whatever it was, I always knew I wasn’t measuring up, and I was not good. And I used to plead with God to make me good and to forgive my sin, and you know what? He would not just make me good. But I had no idea that prayer was something beyond obsessively looking at my own sin and trying to fight my way out of it.
Nikki: And I think that there is subtleness that might not get picked up by someone who isn’t Adventist. You’re not talking about 1 John 1:9, confessing your sin. You’re talking about trying to be good enough to be accepted and saved, and your means of salvation was through perfection, which came through compulsive prayer. So as we were talking about this a little bit ago, I was trying really hard to think of a text that commands us to pray to be good, to pray to be perfect, to pray to be sanctified. Our sanctification, it was foreordained. We read in Romans 8 that He predestined us to be transformed into the likeness of His Son. It’s His purpose in us. We don’t have to ask Him to sanctify us. That’s a part of being in the indicative. That’s a part of the life of the believer. Our commands to pray are commands to do so from the position of having been saved, unless we haven’t been saved, and then the call is to repent. It’s to repent before God and to believe.
Colleen: That’s why this Ephesians passage has been such a relief for me as a believer later in my life because, first of all, I know I’ve put on the belt of truth. I know that I know that Jesus completed the atonement on the cross, and that has changed everything. And then the second piece of armor is another thing that I now know is not something I’m just having to figure out how to do, like I thought as an Adventist, but it’s something that’s done for me because of Jesus. It’s the breastplate of righteousness. The breastplate of righteousness is being declared righteous because I’ve trusted in Christ, and it’s interesting that Paul calls it the breastplate. The breastplate in a suit of armor protects the heart. It keeps me knowing I’m His. That righteousness is something the world can’t take away from me and people who resent me can’t take away from me. Even though they’re mad at me or they think I’m failing or they are annoyed because of what I say, that doesn’t take away my righteousness. My heart is the Lord’s. And then the next piece is the shoes of the gospel of peace. I know that the gospel has given me a boldness and a courage to walk through life and to say things I could never have said as an Adventist. I grew up a people-pleaser. I did not want to offend anybody. And here I find that the actual gospel is offensive to people, but because the Lord Jesus has strapped that gospel of peace onto my feet, I can keep walking. It doesn’t throw me off the trail. And the other piece of armor that comes next is the shield of faith. That’s something God does for me. He gives me the faith to believe. And that shield, as Paul says, extinguishes all the flaming darts of Satan. So because I know that God’s word cannot fail, I know that Jesus has finished the atonement, and I know that I belong to Him, He foreknew me, He chose me, He called me, He justified me, He sanctified me in Jesus, that is the faith I have that keeps me from being completely devastated when there are attacks from Satan. I especially love the next piece of armor, which is the helmet of salvation, because my own head can absolutely take me off the path. My doubts, my fears, obsessive worry that I had as a child that I wasn’t good enough, the helmet of salvation protects me from my own head. It’s amazing. And then there’s the word of God, which is the only offensive weapon that we have in this armor. But it is the power of God that He gives to us, His Spirit applies it. So all to say, this armor of God describes the indicatives of being born again, and it’s from that position that Paul says to us, “Devote yourselves to prayer. Pray always in the Spirit.” We can’t even do that if we’re not born again.
Nikki: And we do this from a position of knowing who we’re praying to. Not hoping, but knowing who we’re praying to and knowing what He said is true of His care for us as our Father.
Colleen: He’s our Father. We don’t fear Him, but He is the only one in the universe a person is to fear because He is sovereign, even over evil.
Nikki: So something else I had to think about as we were looking at these words, “continue steadfastly” or “devote yourselves,” I realize this is not talking about, as you’ve said, obsessive-compulsive prayer. This is not constant, continuous, monkish kind of repetitive prayer, and we see that, even in the next part that says, “being watchful.” This is not compulsively scheduled. This is about a lifestyle, and I was thinking, if a marriage counselor told a couple to continue steadfastly in pursuing friendship and communication with the other spouse, it would be about a lifestyle of pursuing that in the marriage. It would not be, you should get nothing else done, this is all you should be doing. This is about a lifestyle. We as believers constantly come before the Father and pray. Being watchful tells us that we’re to be consciously participating and investing in our prayers and in being aware of the needs of others, which we saw in Ephesians when you read it. He said, “being watchful, making supplication for all the saints.” This is where I think of prayer as being almost – well, it’s obviously the vertical thing, but it’s also, in a way, a horizontal thing because we’re coming to our Father, but we’re coming to Him with the needs of those around us. We’re loving those around us by bringing their needs and desires and petitions to Him on their behalf, agreeing with them in prayer. You can’t do this if you’re trying to empty your mind in a prayerful posture. That’s not biblical prayer. It is not running through a rosary. I’m sorry, but it’s not just constantly repeating words someone else wrote. That’s not what it is to pray watchfully. You can’t do that kind of praying with thanksgiving.
Colleen: The thanksgiving part has been hard for me to understand at first. It really came into focus for me, as I’ve mentioned before, when Richard was fired from Loma Linda and I realized that I had to take Matthew 6 seriously, where Jesus says that we are not to worry about what we eat, drink, or wear, that the Gentiles, unbelievers, worry about those things, but nothing is more beautiful than the lilies of the field that were arrayed more beautifully than Solomon in all his glory, and Jesus said, “If God so cares for the lilies of the field, for the birds of the air, for the grass that withers and is gone, how much more will He give you what you need, He knows you need, to eat and to drink and to have clothes to wear.” If you pursue the kingdom of God and His righteousness, which is His gift to us when we believe, and the work He brings to us when we believe Him, He will supply all those things. They will be added to us. And I had to look at that and say, this is not just beautiful poetry. I don’t know how we’re going to pay our bills next month, but this tells me that God knows, and He’s going to see that we have what we need. The miracle was that we did, and neither of us can explain to this day how the Lord provided the funds to pay for our ongoing bills until Richard was able to be employed again, but He did. He took care of us. So His promises can’t fail, and that is the underlying fact that has started to become a new foundation in my life. When I can’t see what’s going to happen tomorrow, and we are sometimes facing really dire things on occasion, I know that God keeps His promises, and those promises are sure, and that is why He can say, “Don’t be anxious, don’t be anxious. Trust me.”
Nikki: And this thanksgiving, this is new to me as a believer. You know, if I had thought about being thankful in prayer as an Adventist, I think I would have just been thankful for the things that were in front of me, the blessings, but I’ve had to learn as a Christian that being thankful to God is something we can do no matter what circumstances we find ourselves in. The word here for “thankful” is “eucharist,” and it means to give thanks for God’s grace. So I may not necessarily say “Thank you Father for my husband losing his job,” but I can say thank you for what you’re doing in the middle of whatever it is that we’re facing at the time. We can thank Him for the grace He gives us to get through, and that’s why we can do this no matter what we’re going through, constantly, continuously. This kind of thankfulness is for God’s grace, which is continuous to us.
Colleen: I even find myself sometimes just thanking Him for who He is and that He is doing things I can’t see, because He is faithful. It’s a whole new thing that I didn’t know as an Adventist, wringing my hands and begging to be good.
Nikki: And it’s different from what I understood suffering to be. It’s not, “Hey, you’re suffering because you have unconfessed sin.” No, in the Christian life we’re told we will have many troubles. We will suffer for Christ’s sake. In Philippians Paul tells the church that it was granted to them to suffer for the sake of Christ. It was a grace, a gift to them, and Scripture tells us all over that when we face various trials, when we suffer, we are being changed, we are being strengthened, we are being blessed. These are things that we can be grateful, no matter what circumstances surround us.
Colleen: And I just want to say again, these are truths for those who believe.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Those who do not believe will not even understand this, but those who do not believe are called to something very profound, and that is to place their trust in the Lord Jesus and His finished work, and then all of this becomes clear. So in verse 3, Paul is a little more specific about how he wants these believers to pray for him. “Praying at the same time for us as well,” he says, “that God will open up to us a door for the word, so that we may speak forth the mystery of Christ for which I have also been in prisoned.” And then in verse 4, “that I may make it clear in the way I ought to speak.” Talk about that, Nikki. You had some really interesting insights into what Paul is saying and the way that’s broken down. What is significant about his request?
Nikki: Well, first of all, if I can just point out, I understood as an Adventist that it was my responsibility to make sure that people heard “the truth” – I’ve got air quotes around that –
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: – and get saved. But here Paul is saying, “Pray that God may open a door for us.” He’s acknowledging the sovereignty of God in ministry, that it’s God who determines and decides when and where these things will happen.
Colleen: It’s also interesting that he’s asking them to pray, and I think to myself, of all the people who spoke forth the mystery of God, Paul had to be one of the most profound, most detailed, most clear, and yet he’s asking these people to whom he’s ministered to pray for him that he will speak forth the mystery of Christ, and he says, “It’s for this that I’ve been imprisoned.” And I find that really kind of tender. Paul is asking these people who have heard the gospel through Paul’s student Epaphras, to pray for him that he will continue to speak forth the mystery of Christ. And I think, these people were partners in ministry with him. I actually understand that to some extent. This work that we do with Life Assurance, Nikki, when we hear from people and we realize that understanding Scripture and unpacking the worldview of Adventism in our heads, it requires a lot of detail, it requires a lot of perseverance on all of our parts, and when people pray for us, it means something very profound to me now.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: We can’t do this without people praying for us. We can’t do this alone. All of us are called to pray for those who teach us.
Nikki: I think it’s important to point out that this is prescriptive, this is a command for the church from the apostle to the Gentiles. So when we talk about hermeneutics and we talk about what are the commands for the church versus what were the commands in the Old Covenant, here we see a command that we continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it, and pray that God will open a door for the word. That is something that we do, and you know, we know that teachers are held to a higher call before God, that they are held responsible for what they teach, and we always hear that, and it’s true. But we also need to see here that there’s also a call for us to be praying for those teachers, that we hold them up before God and we ask Him to help them to be clear, to help them to be accurate as they teach. I love Paul’s humility here.
Colleen: And then he moves from that, that request that people pray for his opportunity to speak the gospel and that he speak it clearly, he moves to verse 5, where he says, “Conduct yourselves with wisdom toward outsiders, making the most of the opportunity,” or “redeeming the time.” You were talking to me earlier, Nikki, about this verse and about conducting oneself with wisdom and making the most of the time. Would you talk a little about the insights that you had?
Nikki: Yeah. It’s interesting that he’s talking about wisdom again, because he talked about wisdom in chapter 2. He told us that we need to beware of the philosophies of the day according to human tradition. He talked about false religion having the appearance of wisdom, but he also talked about the fact that wisdom and knowledge are contained in Christ, and so we can really easily, as we think about how to interact with outsiders, especially as the church, we can come up with pragmatic marketing skills and base how we live in front of them and with them on human tradition and human ideas or we can go to the source, the Man, Christ, and His teaching and Scripture, and that informs us and tells us how to walk wisely with outsiders. And this verse goes on to clarify what it looks like to walk in wisdom toward outsiders, starting with making the best use of the time. The Greek there is literally “redeeming the time.” It’s giving that time that you have with them purpose. It’s not just about protecting yourself from error. That’s certainly in the letter to the Colossians, to have nothing to do with these teachers. But he’s talking specifically about how to live as a believer with outsiders and how to bring them into a knowledge of the truth.
Colleen: When I think about what it means to walk with wisdom towards outsiders, one of the things I always come back to because of my unique shared background with you, Nikki, is this Adventism, sometimes the wisdom toward outsiders really is, how do I interact with the really argumentative and persistent and stubborn Adventists? I mean, there are some who write often, or relatively often, or even those who don’t write often but occasionally, and there’s like a blindness and a refusal to deal with the things that I’m trying to say. How do I walk with wisdom towards people like that? In a sense I’m not an outsider, because I grew up like them, but in another sense I’m very much an outsider, and like you have often said, Nikki, you’ve been told, “Well, I can’t talk to you about my concerns with the church anymore because you’re not one of us anymore.”
Nikki: Right.
Colleen: We’ve been put outside even though we know what the inside is like. It’s a very unique situation, and yet, even in that, we have to speak with wisdom, we have to use the words of Scripture, we have to explain the truth the way God explains it in His word and not try to make up words. Don’t you find that one of the things we’ve had to unlearn is to explain ourselves with words that are not found in Scripture, because that’s what Ellen White did.
Nikki: And sadly, in a very real sense, unless they’re truly born again, those Adventists you’re describing are the ones who are outsiders because Paul is talking about those who stand in the indicatives versus those who don’t. That’s the whole purpose of this ministry. If we didn’t believe that they had a false gospel that made them outsiders, then we wouldn’t do this. There’d be no purpose for this. This would only be divisive and destructive. They don’t understand what Christ did, and so we make the most of that time. We seek to redeem the time we have with them, with their ear or if they’re reading. We long for them to know what we know, more than we desire to be liked or accepted or appreciated, because that’s not something we experience very often from them. We know that we have this brief moment with them, and the wisest thing we can do may absolutely offend their very senses.
Colleen: And that’s why it’s so reassuring to know that these commands of Paul are given to us, even as we look back into what we came out of, but because we are now standing in a new position, the indicatives of salvation, these things are possible, and the Lord Himself will give us the wisdom to love them and speak for Him without fearing our reputation and without deliberately offending. He gives us the wisdom to speak for Him so that He will be glorified. Ultimately, at the end of the day, it’s not me I want anybody to remember, it’s Jesus, and He knows how to make that happen. So finally we come to verse 6, “Let your speech always be with grace, as though seasoned with salt, so that you will know how you should respond to each person.” Talk about that “seasoning,” Nikki.
Nikki: So verse 6 tells us how to do verse 5. The way that we talk to people is really important. The way that we present them with truth, with the gospel, is really important, even when we’re confronting error. It makes me think of 1 Peter 3, where Peter says, “Always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks for the reason for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and respect, having a good conscience, so that, when you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame. For it is better to suffer for doing good.” So we’re actually called to speak with outsiders – and he says “When you are slandered,” not “if you are slandered” – outsiders who may go and turn and slander us after we share truth. We’re to speak even to them with gentleness and with respect, and in 2 Timothy Paul says, “Have nothing to do with foolish, ignorant controversy.” So this doesn’t mean that when we’re speaking with outsiders that we are responsible to engage with that argumentative nature that we often encounter. We can have permission here to have nothing to do with foolish, ignorant controversies, knowing that they breed quarrels. The Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness. And God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth.” So what I see when I look at these texts and when I see that we are to be gracious in our speech, seasoned with salt, which makes food appealing, which makes things appealing, I see that the motive for that is not only to obey God and His word, but it’s so that perhaps God may grant them repentance. When we don’t submit to Scripture, for the purposes of Scripture, that God would grant them repentance, that they would be drawn to the message, then all we’re doing is shouting from our flesh for the sole purpose of being right. That, to me, is the epitome of doing your works in the flesh.
Colleen: I could not agree more. There are pastors that I have heard who actually kind of make a trademark of using shock-jock talk sometimes, to get the attention of people, and you know, I don’t see any place in Scripture that gives us the permission to defile, if you want to say that, the word of God and the gospel of the Lord Jesus with shocking, maybe even a little off-color talk just for the sake of getting people’s attention. No. The gospel is a pure, true, bottom line reality, and we are commanded to speak well of the Lord, to speak accurately of the word, to give up coarse speech and jesting, and like he says here, “Let your speech always be with grace.” Shock talk is not grace. Our goal is to make the Lord Jesus clearly presented as He presents Himself in His word and not to muddy the waters with our own personality and our own feelings about it. We have one person we serve, the Lord Christ, and our goal is to help others know Him as He is.
Nikki: And can I just say, for the sake of the people pleasers, I know you well. [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: Speaking with grace does not mean making hard things palatable, because once you start doing that, you start moving into the wisdom of the world, that marketing idea that it’s supposed to be easy. We’re speaking the truth. I like the point that many people make that salt also preserves, and we are speaking the truth, and I remember at an FAF conference – I may have shared this on here before – I spoke with a Christian, and I said, “I just don’t understand how a loving God could send anyone to hell,” and she said to me, “I don’t understand how He couldn’t.” She said something hard. That was hard for me to hear.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: But she said it with love in her eyes, in her tone, and it stayed with me. And it has been a gift that keeps on giving, as I think about it. Understanding the just wrath of God has changed so much for me. Choosing not to put my head in the sand on that matter and say, “Oh, I don’t want to deal with that, that’s not an essential thing,” was not an option for me because she spoke with wisdom and with gentleness and respect and with love. She spoke the truth of God. And I thank her so much for that.
Colleen: That is a great illustration, Nikki. The truth is always a gift, if we speak truthfully and lovingly.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: It’s never a gift to be obscure about the truth and leave somebody not quite understanding. And I want to say, as we end this, if you haven’t trusted the finished work of Jesus, if you haven’t clearly gone before Him and said, “All of my attempts to be good have been sin. I need a Savior because I can’t be good. No matter how much I pray or how much I try, I can’t be good.” If you haven’t gone before Him and said, “I am just throwing myself on your mercy,” we ask that you do it. And I want to end with a little passage from the companion book of Ephesians. Paul has this amazing prayer for the people that he’s ministering to, and this is the prayer that I want to end this with. I want everyone who hears this to experience this reality. This is Ephesians 3:14-19: “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God.” That is our prayer for everyone who hears this.
Nikki: We hope you’ll join us next week as we finish up the end of this letter, this amazing letter to the Colossians. Paul is going to give us his final greetings to those at the church of Colossae, and it’s going to be a real blessing, taking a look at who some of these people are.
Colleen: Thank you so much for being with us again as we’ve talked through part of this epistle, and we look forward to seeing you next week.
Nikki: Bye for now.
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