“Christ Formed in You” or “Christ in You”—Colossians 1, Part 3 | 68

Colleen and Nikki walk through the third part of chapter one of Colossians. Ellen White, the Adventist prophet taught that Christ is “formed in you”—is that true? Transcription by Gwen Billington.

 

Nikki:  Welcome to Former Adventist podcast.  I’m Nikki Stevenson.

Colleen:  And I’m Colleen Tinker.

Nikki:  And we are on our third podcast now for the letter to the Colossians, and it has been such a fun thing to walk through this with you, Colleen, especially after doing Hebrews.  I’ve found, as I read, so much of what we’ve just studied in Hebrews shores up and supports the stuff Paul is saying to us in Colossians.

Colleen:  It’s true.  I had not seen so much of the depth that we’re beginning to uncover here.  It’s so exciting and so clear.

Nikki:  Now, before we jump into our passage, I just want to remind you that you can write to us if you have any comments or questions by writing to formeradventist@gmail.com, or you can visit proclamationmagazine.com to see our Proclamation! online articles.  You can follow us or like us on Instagram and Facebook, and we would love it if you would write a review.  It helps expand our reach.  Now, Colleen, as you were reading and preparing for this passage of Colossians, I would love to hear you talk a little bit about what the verse in 27, “Christ in you, the hope of glory” meant to you as an Adventist.  How did you understand that?

Colleen:  Well, first of all, I have to say, I understood it vaguely, like poetic metaphor.  What did that really mean?  I wasn’t sure.  But in a big picture sense, I always thought of “Christ in you the hope of glory” as being some sort of picturesque, inaccurate but lovely reference to power from God that would come into me when I was committed to truth, which I understood to be Adventist truth, and it would help me be good.  It didn’t work very well, it seemed.  I was always fighting with myself, always struggling with sin, but that was what I understood, that He would send His power, send His Spirit, whatever that was, and it would be in me, and it would give me power to overcome sin internally, give me power to overcome sin in my own life.  What about you?

Nikki:  That makes a lot of sense the way you describe that.  I had the idea that if I was behaving properly, then He would come and be in me, but if I misbehaved, He’d leave.  I thought that was what it was to grieve the Spirit, that He would leave me if I wasn’t behaving, and so my hope of glory was really related to my character and my process of sanctification:  Where am I in that?

Colleen:  That was me too.  I would just be consumed with guilt if I finished washing the floors after sundown on Friday night.  Now, you ask, why did it matter?  Well, having been raised by my Mom, it mattered to have that floor clean at least once a week, but I really believed I could fall out of salvation or grieve God so much that He would turn away from me if I sinned.  I had no understanding of being made right and justified and that sanctification was an outgrowth of being saved.  I really thought that my behavior was part of staying saved.  This passage in Colossians is just completely the opposite of that Adventist worldview.

Nikki:  Yeah, and I want to say for any of our listeners who may not have an Adventist background, finishing the floors before the sun goes down on Friday is completely tied to keeping the Jewish Sabbath, the understanding we had of keeping it, and that really was the mark of the saved or the lost, wasn’t it?

Colleen:  Well, Ellen White was very clear that it was the mark.  In fact, she called it “the seal of God.”  So guarding the edges of the Sabbath became as important as not doing any work during those hours.  It was just all tied up in having the seal of God and being worthy of being saved.  So, Nikki, as we look at verses 24 to 29 in Colossians 1 this week, it’s quite an astonishing passage that explains what it means to be in Christ and to have Christ in us.  It’s kind of written as one continuous section, so would you mind just reading those verses for us before we start talking about them?

Nikki:  “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of His Body, that is, the church, of which I became a minister according to the stewardship from God that was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to His saints.  To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of Glory.  Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ.  For this I toil, struggling with all His energy that He powerfully works within me.”

Colleen:  Let’s look first of all at that verse 24 because it seems a little enigmatic, and I used to look at this verse and not really think I understood it.  He says he is rejoicing, Paul, who’s writing this letter, by the way, in prison in Rome under house arrest, but he is in prison for the gospel.  He says, “I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I do my share on behalf of His Body, which is the church, in filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions.”  How do you understand that now, Nikki?

Nikki:  Well, a lot better after preparing for the podcast.  I will admit that this verse has always been a little bit of a question mark for me.  This filling up what Christ was lacking just, I don’t know, I never got it, but in some of the commentaries that I read, it was helpful to see that this is not about our salvation at all.  This is not about the completion of the atonement of Christ.

Colleen:  Right.

Nikki:  The last words of Christ on the cross were, “It is finished.”  He completed what was needed, and so what Paul is doing here is he is sharing in the fellowship of suffering.  He is suffering with Christ for the purpose of spreading the gospel, a very unique role given to him as the apostle to the Gentiles.  One of the commentators I read, John MacArthur, said, “They begin to persecute the church because the church stood in the place of Christ, and since Christ wasn’t around to hate, they hated the people who stood in His place.”

Colleen:  I began to understand too that the sufferings of Christ on the cross, as you said so well, were complete, the atonement was done.  Bringing in the Gentiles and bringing the gospel into the world, which was the job that Jesus Himself gave to Paul and to the other apostles, that job still had to be done, and it did result in persecution and suffering from people who didn’t believe.  In a very real sense, when Paul says he’s filling up what’s lacking in Christ’s afflictions, it’s not referring to His work of atonement.  It’s referring to the work of growing the Body of Christ, and when you think about believers literally being the Body of Christ of which Christ is the head, Paul’s sufferings in behalf of the gospel, in behalf of bringing new believers out of darkness into light is suffering for the sake of Christ.  It is suffering that is happening in Christ’s Body for the sake of Christ’s Body and for the sake of the glory of Christ.

Nikki:  Yeah, and all you have to do is read through Acts, and you see everywhere Paul went, he ended up truly persecuted.  He was hunted by people who hated him.  They followed him from town to town, beating on him and throwing him in prison and just terrible things.

Colleen:  Stoning, left for dead.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  So after he says he’s rejoicing in those sufferings, he says in verse 25, related to the church for whom he is suffering, “Of this church I was made a minister according to the stewardship from God bestowed on me for your benefit, so that I might fully carry out the preaching of the word of God.”  Now, what does he mean that he was made a minister of the church according to the stewardship from God?  And what does he mean that all of this is for the benefit of the people he’s writing to?  How do you understand that, Nikki?

Nikki:  Well, the way I understand it is that Paul was called by God.  His whole life was interrupted.  He wasn’t seeking to know Jesus.  [Laughter.]

Colleen:  No.  [Laughter.]

Nikki:  He was persecuting those who named the name of Jesus, and so God called him and told him what he would suffer for Him.  You can read about that in Acts 9.  So Paul knew he was going to suffer for Christ.  When he was brought to life, when the Lord revealed the gospel to him and made him His own, He also told him, “You will suffer many things for my name’s sake.”  And so he knew he had been given a stewardship.  One of the other things that I read about as I was preparing, also from John MacArthur, he said, “A steward was a slave who managed his master’s household, supervising the other servants, dispensing resources and handling business and financial affairs.  Paul viewed his ministry as a stewardship from the Lord.  The church is God’s household, and Paul was given the task of caring for, feeding, and leading the churches for which he was accountable to God.”

Colleen:  That’s really a wonderful explanation.  God had put Paul in charge of the gospel as it went into the Gentile nations.  What a huge job!  Because, as we talked about before, the Day of Pentecost occurred in Jerusalem, and Jews came to Christ that day.  In Acts 8, the gospel came to the Samaritans, and those Samaritans received the Holy Spirit when they believed in the Lord Jesus.  And last of all, the Gentiles came to Christ when they heard the word and Peter preached to them in Acts 10, and the first group of Gentiles received the Holy Spirit exactly as the Jews and the Samaritans had done, but now here comes Paul, and his job is to take this gospel, which has been introduced to all of these people groups by Peter, first of all.  Paul is given the task of traveling through the known world at that time, through the Roman Empire, and taking the gospel to the Gentiles, the Gentiles, who had not known Yahweh, who had not had the Old Covenant and the covenants of promise.  They did not know anything about God and Judaism, and here he’s bringing the gospel to them.  That’s an enormous stewardship, to be responsible for that.  What a job God gave Paul!

Nikki:  I think about these Colossians, who never met Paul.  They received the faith through Epaphras, who knew Paul, and now this Paul guy [laughter] is writing to them –

Colleen:  Oh, yeah.

Nikki:  – and he’s saying, “Listen to me.  I am suffering.  I rejoice in it, but I am suffering for your sake.  I’m filling up what’s lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of His Body, the church,” and he’s saying, “I became a minister according to the stewardship that God gave me to make the word of God fully known to you.”  And so they have these questions.  They have these false teachers there in Colossae, and he’s saying, “I’m the one tasked with helping you understand what’s true of God.”

Colleen:  That is such a neat way to explain it, Nikki.  These people who had never known him or seen him but knew of him are hearing from him, and he’s owning them.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  He’s connected to them.  He’s taking responsibility for them.  He’s loving them for God by giving them the truth that they need to keep them from veering off into false teaching.  And I have to say, Nikki, sometimes when I have conversations or email or see conversations online in support groups for former Adventists, I feel such a sense of grief when I see so many formers who aren’t really sure where to go after they come out, and they’ve become beguiled by things that are really not biblical.  It’s really upsetting, and the word of God is so clear.  It really keeps us straight on what is doctrinally pure, what is true about Jesus.  That’s one reason why I love doing these podcasts with you because I think everybody who leaves Adventism – I’m including myself in this – needs to become immersed in God’s word and understand what it says because it completely dismantles Adventism, and the only way we can get those Adventist frameworks out of our head is through understanding Scripture.

Nikki:  And I want to say, the only way that we can ever find a healthy church or a teacher we can trust is if we know the word of God in its context so that we know when it’s being used properly or when it’s being used to manipulate, because that happens outside of Adventism too.

Colleen:  That’s very true.

Nikki:  But I know what you mean.  It’s interesting, God puts love in the hearts of those He calls to do ministry, He puts love in them for the people that they are to minister to, whether they’ve met them or not.

Colleen:  So then we come to verse 26.  Now, Paul has just explained that he’s been made a steward of the gospel, a minister of the church, so that he can preach the word of God, and then in verse 26 he explains what that is.  He goes, “…that is, the mystery which has been hidden from the past ages and generations, but has now been manifested to His saints.”  I just want to say this about the word “mystery” when it shows up, especially in the New Testament, and Paul uses it several times in his epistles.  A mystery in the Bible is not what we think of when we think of, like, Agatha Christie – whodunit? what happened?  A mystery is something that exists that is real, that is even hinted at in the Old Testament but has not been fully disclosed yet.  So when a mystery is revealed in the New Testament, it’s as though God has just reached down and pulled a scarf or a blanket off of the thing that had not yet been fully revealed, and there it is, fully existent, and now we see it clearly.  Paul is comparing the fullness of the gospel in Christ to a mystery that has always existed but was not fully revealed in the Old Testament.  Nikki, what do you think Paul means when he says, “This is the mystery which has been hidden from the past ages and generation but has now been manifested to His saints.”  Who are the saints, and how has this mystery been manifested to them?

Nikki:  That’s a great question:  Who are the saints?  I often forget that, as an Adventist, I thought the saints were angels. 

Colleen:  I did too.

Nikki:  I didn’t think humans were saints.  I thought that was Catholic.

Colleen:  I didn’t either.

Nikki:  This is clearly saying that the mystery that was hidden for ages has now been revealed to His people, believing people of God, the church.  And I like your word.  I like – NASB says “manifested,” the ESV says “revealed,” but it is a manifestation because it’s the new birth.

Colleen:  Yes.  When we are born again through believing in the finished work of Jesus, all of those things which seemed obscure, vague, opaque, maybe not real, but all those realities in Scripture suddenly came into full view because God gave us life, He gave us spiritual life in our dead spirits.  And not only that, He has given us His own Spirit, who teaches us the truth, who teaches us what these words in Scripture mean.  I can’t even tell you how many times since I’ve left Adventism I’ve been reading a passage and it’s like, “I never saw that as an Adventist.”

Nikki:  Yep.

Colleen:  But now it makes sense.  Now that we have looked a little bit at what he’s saying he’s doing and to whom he is preaching and to whom this mystery is being revealed, we’re going to move into verse 27, and 27 – while we were talking about it before we did the podcast, Nikki, it just became clear that 27 is a verse that is like a funnel opening up, with revelation from God about what is real that exposes so many layers of Adventism.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  So do you mind reading that verse again, and we’ll just talk through it and talk about some of the things we realized it said about Adventism and the lies about Adventism that it revealed.

Nikki:  So verse 27:  “To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

Colleen:  Those first words, “to whom God willed to make known,” is referring back to the way the last verse ended, the saints are the people to whom He willed to make known, and here we go, “what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”  Can you explain what you see that saying right now?  What is Paul saying the mystery is?  And he’s writing to Gentiles, remember.

Nikki:  Yeah.  Part of that mystery is the fact that the Gentiles are a part of God’s people.

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  It was alluded to in the Old Testament, but I don’t think that the Jews understood what was going to happen, what that really fully meant, that God was going to come and indwell even the Gentiles.  I think even the Jewish disciples maybe weren’t completely clear on that.

Colleen:  I don’t think they were.  I think that’s one reason we have the account in Acts 2, Acts 8, and Acts 10 where Peter went and witnessed the three people groups, Jews, Samaritan, and Gentiles, receiving the Holy Spirit in exactly the same way because the Samaritans and the Gentiles had not come up through Judaism.  They hadn’t believed in the law.  They hadn’t been part of the Old Covenant, and yet here, when they hear the word of Jesus, they’re believing and being filled with the Holy Spirit exactly as the believing Jews were.  I don’t think any of those Jewish believers early on understood this from the Old Testament.

Nikki:  Well, wasn’t it true that when they were in that Gentile soldier’s home and they all started manifesting the indwelling of the Spirit they were saying, “Well, you know, if God chose to do this, what’s to keep us from baptizing them?”  [Laughter.]

Colleen:  Exactly!  [Laughter.]  It must have been quite a surprise.

Nikki:  Yeah.

Colleen:  And it sounded, in the story in Acts 11, where Peter told the story to the leaders of the church in Jerusalem and again in Acts 15, where they met for the Jerusalem Council to figure out whether the Gentiles needed to be circumcised and keep the law, the Jewish believers in Jerusalem were thrilled when they heard how God was bringing Gentiles to faith.  It made them praise God, it said.  So they were thrilled, but it was not something they would have intuitively understood prior to it happening.

Nikki:  Which is so funny to me because Jesus told them that they were going to go into all the parts of the earth to share the gospel, teaching everybody everything that He’s commanded, and Jesus told Peter He would give him the keys to the kingdom, but he had no way to understand what that meant, and then he has this vision with the sheet and the animals and the food and then being called to a Gentile’s home, and it was all, every step of the way, I think, a surprise to them.  I find that humorous.  [Laughter.]

Colleen:  [Laughter.]  It was an amazing thing God did, and you know, I want to say again, the accounts in the Book of Acts that describe the formation of the church describe a one-time, unrepeatable event.  We can’t look to the story of the Samaritans in Acts 8, for example, and say, “Oh, we can have a second blessing by praying again and receiving the Holy Spirit again.”  That’s not what that story is saying.  That story is saying God sent Peter and John to see what had happened with those Samaritans as Philip preached to them, and then to see that they had not received the Holy Spirit, and Peter, the eyewitness who had been present in Jerusalem in Acts 2, prayed for them, and under his watch, as you might say, they received the Holy Spirit when they understood who Jesus was and who the Holy Spirit was.  And then again in Acts 10, it was Peter who was there.  Peter was given the keys to the kingdom, as you said, by Jesus, and that actually is when he went to these people groups and was present and, you might want to say, oversaw their hearing the gospel and receiving the Holy Spirit.  That was a one-time, unrepeatable event because it was the foundation of the church.  And if those three people groups hadn’t all been receiving the Holy Spirit in exactly the same way, the church would have been divided from the beginning because the Jews would never have believed that the Samaritans and the Gentiles could be fully God’s children without coming through Judaism.

Nikki:  That was such a fun thing for me to learn after leaving Adventism, that bit of history.  I never understood that, Peter getting the keys to the kingdom.

Colleen:  And we can’t look at that and say, oh, that’s a story for me.  No, that’s like reading a history book.  We don’t repeat the Gettysburg Address.  We read about it, we understand the effect it has had on our history as a nation, but we don’t go back and repeat it for ourselves.  That’s what the Book of Acts is.  It’s a story of history, of how the church was formed.

Nikki:  And then for God to take Paul, who was so well taught in the Jewish tradition, in the Torah, who was a Jew among Jews, as he said, and to send him to the Gentiles to teach.

Colleen:  [Laughter.]  I know!

Nikki:  It must have been incredibly humbling, but He also placed in him a tremendous love for the Gentiles, and you see that in all of his letters.

Colleen:  Yes.  Interestingly, he had been from Tarsus, which was a Roman territory.  He was a Roman citizen, and he spoke Greek.  So he understood the cultures to which God sent him and he knew their language well.  God prepared him in the most remarkable way.  He understood the covenants inside and out, he understood Judaism, and he understood the Greek/Roman culture.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  God perfectly prepared him for the work He gave him to do.  But back to verse 27, what does he mean when he says the mystery is that “Christ in you, the hope of glory,” is going to be realized among the Gentiles?

Nikki:  This is talking about the assurance of their salvation, of their glorification, on the basis of the indwelling of Christ in the Gentiles.  This is the mystery of the church, that we are in Christ, that Christ is in us, and because of the righteousness of Christ, we will be glorified when He comes to get us.

Colleen:  I just want to say that as an Adventist this didn’t make a lot of sense to me.  I just thought it was a little trivial reference to the fact that, well, Paul is writing, and he’s saying, well, know, back then it made a big deal of difference whether a person was a Gentile or a Jew, and he’s saying, “Now, now, now, the Gentiles are going to have Christ in them.”  I didn’t understand that there was something significant about that for me, because as an Adventist, I believed I was Israel.  I believed I was part of spiritual Israel.  What might have been said about the Gentiles was just detail.  It didn’t make sense to me personally.  I thought I had a right to everything that God had promised to Israel, and that’s why I felt that the law was mine, the Sabbath was mine.  There’s something really significant here about the fact that I’m a Gentile, and what we’ve learned in Hebrews and what we’ve learned in studying the covenants, I can’t consider myself to be part of Israel because I’m part of the church.  I’m a believing Gentile.  That’s a completely different thing from being a believing Jew.  And I can’t just assume, then, that because now I believe in Jesus that I can go back and claim everything Israel had.  I don’t have a legal right to claim the law.  I don’t have a national right to claim the law.  I don’t have any right spiritually to claim the law because Jesus came and fulfilled the law.  And as a Gentile, I’m not Israel.

Nikki:  That’s very significant, and I remember when I first left Adventism and I learned that I wouldn’t have even been allowed to attend the Jewish synagogue on Sabbath had I been alive back then because I was a Gentile woman.

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  And I wouldn’t have been allowed to keep the Sabbath or to do some of the things that I assumed were my responsibility to do in order to uphold the law of God and to be saved as an Adventist.  I wouldn’t even be permitted to do it as a Gentile.

Colleen:  That’s so true.  In Ephesians 2 Paul says this about Gentiles, and this was true of me and my heritage.  This would have been true of me.  He says, “Remember that at one time you Gentiles, called the uncircumcision, remember you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.”  He’s saying that in the Old Testament during the time of the Nation of Israel, when they were living under the Mosaic covenant, Gentiles were not part of that.  They had no access to the covenants of God.  He even says they were without God and without hope in the world.  And I don’t think I understood that as an Adventist.  I thought, well, you know, Gentiles could believe and they could come and worship with the Jews.  Well, yes, God did provide a way for them to come to know Yahweh through the Nation of Israel, but I didn’t understand that by nature Gentiles were separated from the hope that God had given Jews.  And here Paul is saying, you Gentile believers, before Jesus, before you knew about the finished work of Jesus, you had access to none of this.  You had access to nothing because it was through the covenants of promise that God gave hope, and you were not part of those.  And then he goes on to say, “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.  For He Himself is our peace, who has made us both” – both meaning Jew and Gentile – “one and has broken down in His flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances that He might create in Himself one new man in place of the two.”  This is all in mind when Paul is saying here to the Colossian believers, this mystery that I am preaching that has changed your life is the mystery that Christ is in you and you’re a Gentile who had no access to God under the Old Covenant, but now, in Christ, all of this is available to you.  It’s a completely new administration.

Nikki:  This was really important for me to understand, for all of us to understand when we leave Adventism.  But in Romans 11:25 we read, “Lest you be wise in your own sight, I want you to understand this mystery, brothers.  A partial hardening has come upon Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in.”  That verse helped me understand there really are two groups we’re talking about here.  There is Israel, and there are the Gentiles, and there’s a partial hardening over Israel.  That does not mean that they’ve been thrown away and cast away.  There’s a partial hardening.  This is another one of those “until” verses that people like to ignore, “Until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in.”

Colleen:  And I want to say there are two groups originally, the Israel and the Gentiles, and nobody’s cast away here.  But the church is a mystery too, and now Gentiles and believing Jews are part of a new group called the church.  And the church is marked by what Paul is teaching the Colossians, that when we believe in Jesus, we are indwelt by His Spirit.  That’s something Israel did not get.  Back to the Romans passage you were mentioning, Nikki, this is so significant because as an Adventist I was taught that God set aside the Israelites and that now I was the Israelite, we were the Israelites, we had the law, we had everything God had given Israel, and that’s not what Scripture says.

Nikki:  And I want to point out too, one of the other comforts that this verse brought me, when I understood, was that there’s going to be a fullness of the Gentiles.  That means a completeness.  That means the Lord knows all who are His, and none who are His will not come to Him.  And so as I worried about whether or not people I loved would ever come to faith, I found peace in knowing that those who are His will.  Whether it’s through my witness or someone else’s, there will be a fullness of the Gentiles, and no one will be lost who is supposed to come to Him.

Colleen:  That’s right.  Jesus even said that, “No one the Father gives me will I cast aside.  No one will not come that the Father gives me.”

Nikki:  The other thing that this chapter in Romans does is it tells us that God is not finished with Israel.  It’s in these pages that we read, “Do not become arrogant toward the branches,” and he says, if you read a little bit further here, down in verse 28, “As regards the gospel, they are enemies of God for your sake, but as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers, for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.”

Colleen:  Isn’t that amazing?

Nikki:  Yeah.  This reminds me of our covenant study.  So this is the unconditional covenant that God made to David.

Colleen:  And to Abraham.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  So these promises that God made, they stand.  Just the fact that we now have the church, that the gospel has gone to the Gentiles, that does not mean that those promises that God made throughout the Old Testament to Israel are now null and void, as I was taught in Adventism.

Nikki:  Right.

Colleen:  It was a relief to me to become a Christian, to believe I could believe the Bible, and to realize I didn’t have to, as a friend of mine once said, throw out half of the Old Testament because it was now null and void.  [Laughter.]

Nikki:  Right.  [Laughter.]

Colleen:  What God says, God will do, even if we haven’t seen it yet.  He’s not throwing out Israel, and He’s not neglecting the Gentiles, and He has a new Body now called the church, and He’s indwelling us.  But, Nikki, while we were studying for this, you were doing a little more digging into what we thought “Christ in you the hope of glory” meant as an Adventist and realized that it was very vague, but you found some great quotes.  Do you want to share some of those with us?

Nikki:  Yeah, I’d love to.  I wanted to know what did Ellen say about “Christ in you, the hope of glory,” and what I found was that she liked to say, “Christ formed in you, the hope of glory,” an interesting addition to the text, “Christ formed in you.”

Colleen:  That’s a completely different meaning.

Nikki:  It really is a different meaning.  And it’s not a surprising change, given her gospel.  I found several quotes.  I’m going to just share four of them with you.

Colleen:  Okay.

Nikki:  This one was the most shocking.  It sounded so New Age.  This is from Mind, Character, and Personality, Volume 1, page 27.   “Pure and undefiled religion is not a sentiment, but the doing of works of mercy and love.  This religion is necessary to health and happiness.  It enters the polluted soul temple and with a scourge drives out the sinful intruders.  Taking the throne, it consecrates all by its presence, illuminating the heart with the bright beams of the Sun of righteousness.  It opens the windows of the soul heavenward, letting the sunshine of God’s love in.  With it comes serenity and composure.  Physical, mental, and moral strength increase because the atmosphere of heaven as a living, active agency, fills the soul.  Christ is formed within, the hope of glory.”

Colleen:  That’s like Christ consciousness in the New Age.  It’s like little Christs.

Nikki:  Yeah, so Christ is formed within when you do religion –

Colleen:  Right.

Nikki:  – because all of this started with religion, and religion is kind of personified, “It consecrates all by its presence, illuminating the heart.”  “It opens the windows of the soul.”  “With it comes serenity and composure.”  This is religion.

Colleen:  This woman did not know Jesus.  She couldn’t talk about an inanimate thing, an inanimate idea as a soul transforming power if she knew Jesus.  Only Jesus can transform the soul.  No attitude or belief system changes the heart.  Only God does that.

Nikki:  She’s talking about gaining a higher knowledge and a higher wisdom and altering your physical and mental and moral strength.  That’s not Christ in you.  Christ in you is a real thing.  It is God indwelling those who are His.

Colleen:  She’s not describing that at all.  She’s describing a process that is still taught in the New Age, which is the idea of Christ forming in you, that there’s a Christ consciousness.  In fact, New Age people will even say Jesus is the ultimate Christ figure because He had the Christ consciousness perfectly developed.  That’s heresy.

Nikki:  Yeah, and that is your hope of glory.  If we were going to use Christian words to describe what she’s teaching, and I don’t think you can, but it’s more on par with sanctification being the hope of your glory.

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  The changing of your character and who you are.  And the Bible does say that we are transformed into the image of Christ, but this happens after we’re born again, after God Himself indwells us.  It’s not the same thing.

Colleen:  Not at all.

Nikki:  So then my next quote is taken from –

Colleen:  The second volume of the Testimonies.

Nikki:  And she’s writing to a pastor, this poor guy.  She says, “You are slow and tedious in your preaching, as well as in everything else you undertake.  You need, if ever a man did, to be energized by the spirit of truth.  You need Christ formed within you, the hope of glory.  You need religion” –

Colleen:  Oh.

Nikki:  – “the genuine article.” 

Colleen:  Again she has completely blasphemed Jesus.  She doesn’t know Him.

Nikki:  No, no.  This is pretty horrifying, and this poor pastor.

Colleen:  No kidding.  And he had no hope from that.

Nikki:  No, no.  So then this next one comes from the Bible Commentary, and she says, “We may behold Christ to good purpose.  We may safely look to Him, for He is all wise.  As we look to Him and think of Him, He will be formed within, the hope of glory.”  So here again, you’re thinking about Him and you’re looking at Him, and that’s forming Him.  There are other quotes where she talks about how He is looking to find His image in you, that He’s seeking for His image in you when He looks at you in your life and how you’re behaving.

Colleen:  Oh, my.

Nikki:  So in this last quote, this is written by Ellen White in Our High Calling, page 247.  She says, “I have a continual longing for Christ to be formed within, the hope of glory.  I long to be beautified every day with the meekness and gentleness of Christ, growing in grace and in the knowledge of Jesus Christ up to the full stature of men and women in Christ.  I must, as an individual, through the grace given me of Jesus Christ, keep my own soul in health by keeping it as a divine channel through which His grace, love, patience, meekness shall flow to the world.  This is my duty and no less the duty of every church member who claims to be a son or daughter of God.”

Colleen:  You know, she is making the job of becoming like Christ all up to her and all up to each person.  She’s saying that she needs to keep her own soul as a channel and that it’s her duty.  She has absolutely misunderstood the gospel, has not understood the finished work of Christ.  I know this sounds harsh, and it sounds like a sweeping statement to make about Ellen White, but her words speak for themselves.  She is not describing the gospel.  She is describing a New Age heresy.

Nikki:  People can lost in her words and say, “Well, isn’t it true that we’re supposed to love people for God and be merciful and kind?”  And I saw a lot of stuff in her various multitude of writings that encourages Christian behavior, godly behavior –

Colleen:  Um-hmm.

Nikki:  – things that Scripture asks us to do, but she is consistently saying, “This is your hope of glory,” and she’s consistently undermining Christ and consistently weaving in terms and words and concepts that come from the kingdom of darkness.

Colleen:  That’s right.  You know, once again I am so struck that the Adventist misunderstanding of spirit makes everything about the gospel impossible to understand for them.  For Ellen White to have made it clear that no human has an immaterial spirit, that we are only bodies that breathe, has completely eclipsed what Jesus does when He makes us new, what the new birth is, and what it means that He indwells those who know Him, who trust Him.  She is describing a completely carnal, physical reality of a person who has to set their mind to becoming good, using all their willpower to keep themselves beat into submission to good deeds.  That’s not the gospel!  If we understood as Adventists that we had spirits that were born dead, that the Holy Spirit has to bring us to life, and that the truth of Jesus’ finished work is the means by which we’re reconciled to God, everything changes.  Ellen White kept people in darkness because she kept them locked in a false worldview.

Nikki:  You know, a lot of Adventists will say, “Well, my hope is in the second coming.  My hope is in the return of Christ, it’s not in my character growth” or whatever.  And they have that hymn, We Have This Hope, and that’s really their gospel message, Jesus is coming again.  And I wanted to go and see a little bit more about what their hymns talk about related to the second coming of Christ, and this one called When He Cometh summed up for me so well why, even though I did hope that Christ would come back, I did desire for that, I was also terrified of it.  In verse 2 it says, “He will gather, He will gather the gems for His kingdom, all the pure ones, all the bright ones, His loved and His own.”  I knew I wasn’t going to be among the 144,000 Adventists – because we were spiritual Israel.

Colleen:  Right.

Nikki:  I wasn’t going to be one of the brightest, purest gems, and so, yes, I wanted Christ to return, but I was terrified of it.  I had no assurance.  And this verse in Colossians, it says, “Christ in you, the hope of glory,” says you have assurance.  If Christ is in you, if you’re born again, it’s His robes for mine.  It’s His righteousness in me, and that is something that cannot fail because it belongs to God.

Colleen:  It’s not just His power giving us the ability to resist sin.  It is literally God Himself –

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  – making His home with us, as Jesus said in John 14.  It is God Himself sealing us with His Spirit, and His own Spirit is our guarantee that we are saved, Ephesians 1:13 and 14.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  This is not just power making us good.  This is God indwelling those who trust Him.

Nikki:  And that was new for the church.  Jesus told His disciples in John 14 that He would send a Helper, He would send another one, and you know who He is already because He is with you, but He will be in you.  And then He says that He will come, and He will be in you – or in us.  And He said, “Because I live, you also will live.”  There’s your hope of glory.  And in Romans 8, Paul says, “If Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the spirit is life because of righteousness, and if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies.”  That’s our hope of glory because Christ is in us.

Colleen:  That’s right, and He does all the work. 

Nikki:  Yeah.

Colleen:  It’s not a maybe.  Paul sums up this amazing chapter with these two verses, “We proclaim Him, admonishing every man and teaching every man with all wisdom, so that we may present every man complete in Christ.  For this purpose also I labor, striving according to His power, which mightily works within me.”  Nikki, do you want to talk a little bit about Paul telling the Colossians he’s proclaiming Him, admonishing every man and teaching every man with all wisdom, so he may present every man complete in Christ.  How do you see that, now that you’re born again and looking at this as a believing Gentile?

Nikki:  Well, I’m very grateful that the Colossians had to struggle the way that they did because in Paul’s teaching and warning so that they would become mature, it has application all the way down in 2020 and in every year between then and now.  He is proclaiming Christ, he is warning everyone against all that is false and all that stands against God, and he’s teaching them truth.  We talked about in our first episode in the letter to the Colossians, epignosis means precise and accurate knowledge.  He wanted them to grow in the correct knowledge of God, and so he’s providing that to bring everybody mature in Christ.

Colleen:  And this is not a maturity that comes from beating ourselves into submission so that we’re finally good.  This is talking about trusting God, trusting Jesus, knowing every moment of our lives that He is the one completing the work started in us, and our job, if you want to call it that, is learning to trust Him when we come into temptation, is learning to trust Him when we meet things we don’t know what to do, is learning to believe that God the Father is our true Father, that Jesus has completed everything necessary for our sanctification and justification and glorification and knowing we can trust Him moment by moment to give us the mind of Christ.  This is becoming complete in Christ.  It’s not about becoming good.  It’s about becoming a trusting son and daughter of God.  And Paul says this purpose of helping people become complete in Christ is the reason he strives and the reason he is preaching.  And again, like you’ve pointed out, Nikki, he’s talking to a group of people he has never met but for whom he has deep love because of their unity in Christ.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  He wants them to know Jesus.  He wants them to love the gospel as much as he does.  And he’s saying he’s able to do this why?

Nikki:  With the energy that God powerfully works within him.

Colleen:  Which is an amazing thing for a man under house arrest to say.  He has power and energy mightily working in him, and here we are in 2020 reading this letter he wrote to a small group of believers in Colossae, and the work that Paul did is still working in us.  It was the power of God.  The word of God is the power of God.

Nikki:  You know, it’s easy, as a former Adventist, to kind of put myself in this place of the church at Colossae, who have been told by various teachers, who they must look up to because they’re listening to them, that there are all these things they need to do in order to be mature in Christ, all of these ways they’re passing judgment on them, food and lifestyle, so any kind of call to be mature, to be mature in the faith, I think would be a stressful thing for me.  It was as an Adventist, to grow in this peculiar faith, it was scary to me, and yet, here’s Paul saying that in order to be mature in Christ, complete in Christ, we have to understand who Christ is and what He did.  We don’t have to look at ourselves and what we’re supposed to be doing and understanding and the secret knowledge of our day.  We’re to look at Christ.

Colleen:  That is such an important point, Nikki.  We don’t need sabbath days, food laws, visions from anyone.  We just need Christ, and as you said, that’s the point of this book.  He is going to be addressing these very things, these very false teachings that the Colossians were being taught to believe, and it was causing them to lose their confidence, and he’s saying, no, Jesus is enough.  And as you’re listening, as you’re reading Colossians with us, if you haven’t fully trusted that Jesus is enough, that His finished work has done everything necessary for your salvation, we just ask you to go back and read it again.  Read the Book of Colossians, read again the gospel, that Jesus died for our sins according to Scripture, He was buried, He was raised on the third day according to Scripture.  That’s all you need to know.  You trust Him, you believe Him, and His Spirit, whom He sends to indwell you, will guarantee your eternal future because He transfers you from death to life when you believe in Him.

Nikki:  So if you have any questions or comments for us, please write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com, and don’t forget that you can go to proclamationmagazine.com to view our online articles.  Follow us on Instagram and Facebook, and join us again next week as we continue through the letter to the Colossians.

Colleen:  See you then.