Colleen and Nikki discuss the second part of chapter three of Colossians. Christians are getting the best makeover ever as Christ teaches them through his word. Transcription by Gwen Billington.
Nikki: Welcome to Former Adventist podcast. I’m Nikki Stevenson.
Colleen: And I’m Colleen Tinker.
Nikki: We’re back with you, walking through Paul’s letter to the Colossians, but before we get started, I’d just like to remind you that if you have any questions or comments, you can write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com. You can visit proclamationmagazine.com to sign up for our weekly emails and to read our online magazine. You can also find a link there to donate to the ministry if you’d like to come alongside us and support what we do here. Don’t forget to follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook. And thank you to those who’ve written reviews where you listen to podcasts, as it has helped expand our online reach. Now, as we continue into the next section of chapter 3, we’re going to be talking about living out what is inwardly true about us, that since we’ve been resurrected with Christ to newness of life, we’re to walk in that newness of life by actively putting off the old self and putting on the things that belong to the kingdom of the beloved Son. Now, Colleen, as an Adventist, whenever I read about the commandments of God, I automatically thought about the Ten Commandments.
Colleen: Oh, me too.
Nikki: As an Adventist, what did you think the commandments of God were, and what role did the commands that we read about in the epistles, like what we’re going to discuss today, have in your thinking?
Colleen: Commandments, the word “commandments,” always to me meant the Ten. And even though I knew there were commands of all sorts all through the Bible, somehow the word “commandments” meant the Ten. And I believe I was taught that implicitly. Maybe not explicitly, but I believe implicitly I was taught that because it’s interesting that every former Adventist that I’ve talked to about this has had the same impression, so I know it’s something taught to us.
Nikki: Two weeks ago, when we were talking about what was nailed to the cross, we talked about a letter written by Uriah Smith, and in it he very clearly explained that whenever the words “commandments of God” are used, it is always talking about the Decalogue, so it was actively taught in the beginning, and it must have just filtered through.
Colleen: I believe it did because it’s how we all seemed to come out, and it’s something that’s very hard to dig out of our vocabulary and our thinking when we start becoming born again Christians and looking at Scripture. So when I looked at the New Testament and I saw all these commands in there like we’re going to read about today, I didn’t think of them as part of “the commandments,” which were the overarching revelation of God’s character, I thought of these as the rules that I had to do in order to stay right with God. I really believed that all of these things were up to me to develop, to remember to do, to remember to pray that I would be able to accomplish them, and that God was looking at me to see how well I did them in order to stay in good standing with Him, but I didn’t think of them as God’s commandments. I thought of them more as the nonnegotiable house rules that I had to have if I wanted to stay in the family of Adventism and in the family of God. How about you?
Nikki: Same thing, it was the same. And you know, I think too that my understanding of the inspiration of Scripture kind of had a role to play in that because the Ten Commandments came from God, they came from His finger, and in saying that, it almost eliminates the idea that any of the other writings of Scripture came from God, and now I understand that all of Scripture is God-breathed, it all came from God, and in fact, when Christ ascended to the Father, He told the apostles, “Go into all the nations, teaching them all the I have commanded you,” and all that we have now from the apostles are the commands of Christ, and they are given to us authoritatively by His chosen apostles through His inspired word, and so they are authoritative, and those are the commands of Christ now, as I understand it.
Colleen: I agree. That’s a really good way to explain it. We had a letter just this week from a young woman who is just starting to have to deal with Adventism because she’s feeling so confused and so depressed, and she’s finding that when she reads the Bible, it doesn’t seem to say the same thing as it does when she talks to her Adventist family and friends –
Nikki: Um-hmm
Colleen: – and she’s just so confused, and she asked, “Is it possible to know truth?” And I understand that question because remembering my days as an Adventist, I used to sort of wonder that too, although I thought I knew truth because I knew Adventism, but it did leave me confused. So I just want to say, this question about what are the commandments and what are all these commands in the New Testament is part of that truth I had no way to understand as an Adventist because the definitions given to me were so explicit. I couldn’t see the New Testament as defining the way a born-again believer lives because I wasn’t taught about being a born-again believer. So I just want to say, for anybody who might be listening and wondering, well, yeah, that’s what you say this means, I just want to say this, we can know truth, and we can know that the Bible is God’s word because it says it is. And if you doubt that that’s true, you can put it to the test. You can decide to ask God to show you what He wants you to know and to read it and ask Him to teach you. But here’s the other side of that experiment: If we’re going to know if the Bible is true, we have to be willing to let go of all other sources of truth. There are two things a person leaving Adventism has to deal with absolutely. One is the gospel as found in Scripture, not the gospel as taught in Adventism, which is vague at best, and your source of authority. And as long as you’re not sure if Ellen White might be authoritative or part of the time authoritative, her existence and her writings will confuse you. Hebrews 1:1-3 is explicit that God spoke to us through prophets in times past, but in these last days He has spoken to us in His Son, and there are no latter-day prophets who are going to be bringing God’s interpretations to us or new information or new understanding about salvation. The Son is the one to whom we listen. So if you can approach Scripture knowing that it claims to be God’s word, that it claims to be His only word to us, that it’s from the Son, that it’s from the Trinity, and that it’s for our instruction and salvation and put it to the test, it’s up to God to reveal and to prove Himself. The deal that you have to remember is, we have to let Ellen go. We can’t test Scripture for truth if we’re holding onto Ellen in the side of our brains and going, “Well, I’ll put Scripture, like, in the Ark but Ellen on the side of the Ark,” like we were taught Moses and the law were placed. That was just silliness. Yes, we can know truth, and God is faithful to reveal it, and we have to be willing to let go of what we believed as an Adventist in order to understand what God said.
Nikki: And if I could say that a little bit stronger –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: More than letting go, we’re commanded to put off the things that were related to the place that God rescued us from. He took us out of the domain of darkness, and we have seen time and again through our walk through Hebrews and Colossians, the teachings of Adventism really do appear to be the doctrines of demons. This is anti-Christ teaching. When we leave that, when we come to understand who Jesus is according to Scripture, who He says He is, and when we come to faith and we’re born again, we put off the things that had to do with our previous life. And so any authority that we got from Adventism, from our upbringing, from our special knowledge about food or about what things mean in Scripture, all of that needs to be set aside, and everything needs to be examined under the Bible alone. And I’ll tell you, the thing that helped me with this when I was first leaving was when my husband told me, “Nikki, if Ellen White is right and if all of her teachings are correct, then we can’t go wrong by setting them aside and reading the Bible because the Bible will lead us right back to her. And if she was incorrect, then it will free us from her.”
Colleen: Your husband was very wise, Nikki. That was a very good way to approach this. And I want to say to the young woman who wrote the letter and to anybody else who has this question, yes, you can know truth. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” We can know Him, and He reveals Himself through His word, but He does not reveal Himself through people who claim to be prophets but speak wrongly of Him. Those are false prophets, and Deuteronomy 18 was very clear that if somebody comes and does a prophecy that does not come true or that speaks contrary to the word of God, we are not to fear that prophet because he or she did not come from God, and that person has no power. So the guilt and the obligation and the fear under which Ellen put us is illegitimate because she is a false prophet. God does not do that to us. God reveals Himself, He tells who we are without Him, He tells us who Jesus is and what Jesus did, and who we are in Him, and it’s absolute truth, and we can know it. It’s discoverable in Scripture. We’re looking at a really fairly short section of Colossians 3 today, but like we said, it’s talking about commands that God gives believers. I want to say one more thing before we launch into this. As I mentioned earlier, I did believe that all the commands in the Bible were for everybody, so when I was an Adventist I would look at everything from the Ten Commandments clear through the New Testament and think, “All of that is up to me to do.” And I did believe that the commands in the New Testament were ways I was supposed to stay in right standing with God and that I had to keep up my salvation if I was going to actually be saved. But that’s not true. God brings us to life when we trust Jesus by transferring us, as you said earlier, Nikki, from the domain of darkness into the kingdom of His beloved Son, as it says in the first chapter of Colossians. So when that happens, we have life from Jesus Himself in us, and His Spirit indwells us, and we’re made alive, we’re new people, and these commands are only for the born again because people who don’t know Jesus can’t do them anyway. It’s not possible. So, Nikki, would you mind reading our passage for today, Colossians 3:12-17?
Nikki: “Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him.”
Colleen: It’s actually a very beautiful passage, when you don’t think of this as something that we have to do to maintain salvation but as something that flows from our assurance of being saved. Nikki, you were talking to me about some of the research that you did into some of the words, beginning in verse 12. What were some of the thoughts you had as you looked at this, “So, as those who have been chosen of God, holy and beloved, put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.” Interestingly, these are all characteristics of Christ, so it’s not possible for an unbeliever even to try to do them. But what were some of the things you thought about as you studied these words?
Nikki: Well, the first thing I noticed is that Paul starts again with the indicatives. He reemphasizes the fact that they are elect of God, they are chosen by God, they’re holy. They’ve been set apart for His use, and they’re beloved of God. And so that is who they are, and because of that, the command is to put on. And I was thinking about that, “put on,” and I don’t know if I’m thinking correctly about it, but it makes me think of putting on the armor or putting on anything, you’re choosing and committing to something when you’re putting something on, and so it seems as though the imperative is calling us to a commitment. He starts with putting on compassionate hearts. Just to back up again, we’re talking about in the Body of Christ, and my mind always goes back to that chapter in Hebrews where we’re told that we’ve come to this Mt. Zion and these angels in festal gathering, to the saints, and so as we set our minds on things above and we think about the Body of Christ, this is where we start doing the agape love, the acting out love, and so we put on these compassionate hearts, and when we do, we can’t easily sin against those we have compassion for. He tells us to put on kindness, and the Greek word there for “kindness” has the idea of meeting needs and avoiding harshness. It’s a kind of service. It’s Spirit-produced goodness which meets the needs of others.
Colleen: I love that phrase.
Nikki: I do too. On the Bible Hub interlinear app it says that we don’t really have a word in English that conveys this. It was interesting to see that. And then the humility. You know, we can only accurately see ourselves when we compare ourselves to Christ, and it’s so easy for us to compare ourselves to each other. But the call is to constantly look at Christ, set our mind on things above, and then from out of that we can have an accurate view of ourselves and of others. The word for “meekness” makes me think of Pastor Gary. He’s often described it as an ox bridled to the bit. It’s strength that is controlled, it’s gentle strength. And the patience, or longsuffering, it’s avoiding the premature use of retribution. It’s allowing for time to pass while you’re angry.
Colleen: It’s not acting in emotion.
Nikki: Yes. It’s like you’ve said, giving up your right to get even. These are high calls that we are being told right at verse 12 to put on these things.
Colleen: Because we are beloved, chosen, and made alive in Him.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Not in order to stay worthy and not to become worthy. These are the consequence of being in Him, and again, that’s not a metaphor.
Nikki: No.
Colleen: In some way we can’t explain, our spirits are with Him, hidden in God, as it said in 3:1.
Nikki: This is resurrected living and in the kingdom of the beloved Son.
Colleen: And it’s something that we do while we still have mortal flesh, and that is the mystery, and that’s the confusing part, especially when people are freshly coming out of Adventism, having been born again. It becomes obvious right away that we have these still-mortal bodies that have an impulse to sin. And like we talked about last week, in Romans 7 Paul talks about the fact that there’s a “law of sin” in our members, in other words in our mortal flesh and mortal brains, we have tendencies and patterns towards sin, but because our spirits are alive and because we’re seated with Christ in heavenly places at the right hand of the Father, we have freedom for the first time to submit to the Lord when we’re tempted instead of just dealing with the sin and the impulse and the desire. We submit it to Him, and our prayer is, “Show me how to honor you in this moment,” and that’s the only way these commands begin to make sense to me. As we move into verse 13, Nikki, I’ve often heard you talk about how significant this phrase has been for you, “bearing with one another, forgiving each other.” As you said already, these commands are talking to believers primarily in the context of functioning in the Body of Christ. Now, we’re not called to leave the world, but we are called to love the Body and to treat the Body as brothers and sisters in Christ in a way that’s different from unbelievers, so that these commands are what the Lord is telling us to do to others that we know know Him, even if they disturb us. Could you talk a little bit about verse 13, please?
Nikki: Yeah, well, again we’re talking about a group of people who have been set apart by God. They have been made holy by God. This is the act of persistently standing shoulder-to-shoulder with other believers, even through suffering. It’s the choice to put on this commitment to the Body of Christ because of who they are, who you are. They’re your inheritance. That’s a new picture, because as much as we tried to think of ourselves as being in the Body of Christ as Adventists, it was not the same thing. They were not a people set apart for God’s use. They were not born again, believing, indwelt.
Colleen: No.
Nikki: I can’t say there aren’t believers inside of Adventism, I’m not trying to go down that road, but the system itself is not a biblically Christian system. And so the idea of bearing with one another was never anything I saw played out. And honestly, not even anything I really ever heard discussed.
Colleen: No, me either. In fact, I remember when we were leaving and we were moving our boys from an Adventist school to a Christian school, our younger son was just about 11 or about to be 11, and he was not happy about having to change schools, and he asked why he had to change. And I remember sitting him down on the couch and praying that the Lord would give me words, and I said, “Okay. What’s wrong with the Adventist school where you’re going?” And he goes, “It’s Adventist.” I said, “Well, what’s wrong with Adventist?” He says, “Ellen White!” And I said, “Well, what’s wrong with Ellen White?” He said, “She was a false prophet!” And then I said, “Yes.” And you know, the interesting thing about this was I was praying as I spoke. I didn’t know exactly where this conversation was going to go or how I would answer him, but I heard myself saying to him, “And because Ellen White was instrumental in Adventism and her visions came from Satan, Satan has a claim on Adventist teachings, and because of that, Adventists cannot have really healthy relationships and they don’t have the tools to resolve their conflicts, so that there’s never any way to really come to a resolution where things are all worked out, and even though you’re going to a Christian school, there will be problems, but because Jesus has a claim on the bottom line of the teachings, there will be ways to have relationships and ways to work out the problems.” And I remember my son just relaxed. His arms unclenched, and he goes, “Oh, okay.”
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: But I was shocked because I had never thought of that before, and what you just said, Nikki, is exactly what I realized that day. I didn’t know how to bear with people in Adventism because there was no power for bearing. We were natural men in the flesh and had no way to mount over our differences with each other.
Nikki: Yeah. The only thing that united us in Adventism was our worldview, our being a peculiar people. That’s kind of what set us apart. It wasn’t what God gives. It wasn’t the new life. It wasn’t the Body that was knit together and held by the head.
Colleen: No.
Nikki: So now when we have conflict with brothers and sisters in the church, no matter how upsetting it may be or heartbreaking it may be, we can honestly look at them and say, “This person loves my Lord, and this person loves my Father, and loves their word, and we have that and we’re going to hold onto that,” and you can move forward. In the next section it says, “If one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.” And inside that word for “forgiving” is the word “xάris,” it’s grace. It’s offering undeserved grace and pardon to our fellow brothers and sisters, and we can do that because we know what that is now. It’s been given to us.
Colleen: And we can do that even without full understanding with the other person.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Sometimes even without the other person even understanding what they might have done that hurt us, if it’s not possible to explain it. We can offer grace to them. It makes me think of what Richard said to me shortly before my mother died. She was a believer, a very unprocessed believer, we might want to say, but he said to me, “You know what? You can tell people, if they wonder about your not sitting with her every moment during her final days, you can say, ‘She and I are fine, and I will catch her on the other side,'” and I think that sometimes. I know that in the kingdom the brothers and sisters that I’ve known, with whom I’ve had maybe things that I couldn’t resolve, I will be able to in the kingdom, because we’re hidden together with Christ in God, and He will resolve everything when we are made new and glorified and our sinful flesh is gone. We have eternity together, and it’s not just, “Oh, well, we’ll go through eternity without ever resolving anything and always offering grace.” No, this is how we live now, because we have eternity in Christ.
Nikki: It’s incredible.
Colleen: So when you look at 14, “Beyond all these things put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity,” how do you explain that now, when you think about it?
Nikki: Well, in order to say how I explain it now, I have to tell you how I understood it as an Adventist.
Colleen: Okay.
Nikki: As an Adventist, my concept of love really was best defined as loyalty, and that loyalty came at any cost. If you loved someone, if you loved your family, if you loved Adventism, you protected it, you guarded it, you never turned your back on it, at least publicly.
Colleen: Right. And you’d circle the wagons –
Nikki: You’d circle the wagons.
Colleen: – if anybody outside –
Nikki: Absolutely. That’s perfect. And I’ve had that experience now even as a former Adventist, where I’ve been told, “Nikki, I can’t talk to you about my issues with the church anymore because you’re not one of us, and family doesn’t talk about family outside of the family.” As an Adventist, the idea of putting on love, which is the perfect bond of unity, it was just kind of a dysfunctional picture. And now when I look at this, now that I know God and now that I have a better picture of who He is and the fact that He is the arbiter of all truth and the one who defines what love is, I can read that text about putting on love – and the word there is agape – I can read that, and I can see that that encompasses responsibility for being truthful, for being willing to bring the truth into these situations with the people in the Body of Christ where it may not be comfortable. It may not always feel warm and fuzzy. And aren’t we all people-pleasers when we come out of Adventism?
Colleen: Oh, we were taught that.
Nikki: And this is a love defined by God that requires action, and it’s also – in the Greek word it has the idea of preference, agapan love. It’s a love centered in moral preference, and so it’s a special kind of affection for one another in the Body of Christ which is defined by God and not by what the world says love looks like. It’s not a circling the wagons.
Colleen: No.
Nikki: It’s a family, preferential love that has the weight of responsibility to truth attached to it.
Colleen: It makes me think of what somebody said to me long ago, when I had just become a stepmother and I had two wonderful, adorable, very young sons who really needed a mom, and this person said to me – and I was feeling very overwhelmed with this sudden responsibility – “Just remember, you’re not loving them for your sake. You’re not even loving them for their sake. You’re loving them for God.” That changed the way I was able to look at the job of raising sons that were stepsons when I felt like everything was against me. I realized I didn’t have to know exactly what to do. I didn’t have to have a flood of warm, fuzzy emotion. I didn’t have to come up with answers that worked. I just had to stand in front of the Lord and say, “Lord, I want to do your will. I want to love these children for you. Please work through me. Please help me to love them for you.” And you know what? He is faithful. I can’t even tell you how He would answer that prayer sometimes, but the fact is He did. And over time He put a deep love that I could identify in my heart for those boys too. This is how He asks us, I realized, to love each other in the Body. We don’t always have a natural affinity for every one of our brothers and sisters in Christ. I mean, temperaments differ and backgrounds differ and people are at various stages of maturity and sanctification. God can show us how to love each other for Him, and that’s a sacrificial love. That’s a love that is willing to put down before the Lord our own preferences and our own feelings of obligation or pain and ask Him to love this person using me as the channel for that love at that moment, and He will do it.
Nikki: And the perfect model is God, who decided to set His love on us, not because of anything we deserved, but because He made a decision and His love for us proceeds from Him, not from our merit in any way. And in fact, this really informs the passage of Scripture we’ll talk about next week, as we look at our relationships, even inside of our families.
Colleen: Yeah, you’re so right. Okay. Nikki, in verse 15, “Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one Body; and be thankful.” You’ve told me at various times how much this particular verse has informed you since becoming a Christian. Could you talk about some of that? This is an amazing verse with a lot of implications.
Nikki: Yeah, well, I’ll tell you, I had a situation where I had been hurt by some sisters in the Lord, and I had to think my way through that. I ended up somehow in Colossians chapter 3, and I read verse 15, “Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one Body. And be thankful.” And I looked at some commentary about it, and the word there for “rule,” the Greek word, means “arbitrate or to act as umpire.” And the picture is, we’re to let the peace of Christ arbitrate in our hearts, even as we have differences among brothers and sisters in Christ. And it was – again, it was like love choosing to defer to Christ, to who He is, to what He offers, to what He cares about, to set aside my reaction to what had happened and to forgive. And it was surprising to me how just understanding that text resolved all of the inner angst that I had as I thought about what had happened. It actually offered peace, which is – I don’t know how to explain.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: So the picture there really is to allow the peace of Christ to be the deciding factor in your differences; defer to Him.
Colleen: That’s amazing, Nikki, and it makes me think also of the fact that this is only possible for those who are born again, because we know who our Father is.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And Romans 8 is so clear, that God asks us to think of Him as not just a formal, legal Father, but as an intimate, personal Father, a Dad, Abba. And sometimes when I’m faced with believers in my life that seem to misunderstand me and I’m not sure how to react, I will, in my head, say, “Father, I don’t know what to do. I need you to take care of me now. Show me where to walk. Show me where to put my feet down and just take care of me.” We can let the peace of Christ rule in our hearts because God is our Father, we are hidden in Him in Christ, and it’s not just a mind game.
Nikki: Uh-uh.
Colleen: It’s not just brave talk or an affirmation we say to ourselves in the mirror, “I am a child of God.” It’s real, because we’ve been born again and adopted by Him, and He cares for us, and He cares that we’re being hurt or misunderstood or even that we might be misunderstanding ourselves. So He takes of us, He takes care of the brother or sister that we’re not feeling understood by, because He’s our Father, and we can trust Him, and we are safe. We don’t have to defend ourselves against the world anymore.
Nikki: And we can know that He loves them just as much as He loves us, that they are His children, they are our siblings; we are a family –
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: – and He’s not a respecter of persons, He’s not playing favorites. And so we can entrust them to Him knowing He will take care of them. He will love them and care for them and show us how to love them and care for them, and we can trust His Spirit to work in our hearts and in their hearts to bring about reconciliation as we pray about it. And as I listen to us talk, I’m realizing, Colleen, it’s always about going back to the indicative. It’s going back to knowing who we are in Him, who other people are in Him, and what that means now.
Colleen: Exactly. Without that, none of this makes sense. These are just good ideas that we can try to put into practice based on willpower and determination. No. We are alive in Christ and hidden in our Father with Him, and that’s why these things make sense. That’s why these are the commands of Christ to the Body. These are not just house rules. This is how we live as living, spiritually alive people, transferred into the kingdom of the Son. We come then to verse 16, “Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you, with all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God.” How do you see that now, Nikki? How do you let the word of Christ richly dwell in you?
Nikki: Well, I kind of see a double meaning there. It makes me think of John 1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” and now He dwells in us, those who are born again. And so in that sense, that’s an act of God. It’s a work of God that I can’t control. I thank Him that He dwells in me. But in the sense of Scripture, the word being Scripture, I see that as a command to be in the word, to hide the word in my heart, to learn from it. Not to just read it and say, “Okay, I’ve read that one,” and go on, but to revisit it and to get it in – it’s that “richly dwelling,” that word is abundantly dwelling, in me and inhabiting me, and it changes us as we do this. This is what provides us with a biblically informed conscience. It makes me think, honestly, of Colossians chapter 1, where he talks about how he prays for them to have spiritual wisdom and understanding so that they can live a life worthy of the calling. It’s a life that is fully pleasing to God, bearing fruit in every good work. That’s where this happens. This is where we grow in our knowledge of God.
Colleen: And then, as we do that, he asks us to admonish one another.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And to admonish one another in all wisdom, teaching from the word of God, teaching what we know because of the word of God dwelling richly in us. You were talking to me earlier about the fact that people who admonish with discernment are not always the most loved people in the general Body of Christ.
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: Could you talk a little about that?
Nikki: You know, nobody really likes to be corrected, and so, of all of the spiritual gifts, I’ve often thought that the gift of discernment is, sadly, the least valued because it’s usually the one that’s pointing out the error.
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: But I’ve noticed that, especially in my early years leaving Adventism, I was in a former Adventist group on Facebook, and one of the things that I saw, one of the dynamics, was that people would speak really freely about ideas about God or something related to Him. There was a lot of kind of guesswork and maybe it’s this, maybe it’s that, just – I don’t know.
Colleen: Speculation.
Nikki: A lot of that, yeah. And whenever somebody would come in with Scripture or correction, the reaction was often very strong, often angry, and the response was, “Well, you’re just like the Adventists. If you think that there’s only one right way to do it, you’re just like them, telling everybody what to do.” There was a lot of frustration and reaction. I understand where that comes from because I think that there really was a lot of kind of busybody legalism that occurred inside of Adventism, inappropriate boundary-crossing advice, but we have to remember that the Lord gifts people in the Body of Christ to come with His word and to bring it to bear on situations that the church is facing or in conversations that believers are having. It means to counsel or to warn. It’s appealing to the mind and urging people to God’s truth, to view things through God’s truth and to respond from God’s truth. And so while it may at times be uncomfortable, it’s something that was intended by God. It was something He gifted His church for.
Colleen: And it’s interesting also that Paul is very specific that we are to admonish one another and teach one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. You know, our Pastor Gary has often said, “Singing is unique to Christianity. Other religions in the world do not sing, but we sing our worship and our praise to God.” And it’s important to realize that these words, psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, are talking about types of music and types of art forms, if you want to say that, that are telling the truth about God, that are doctrinally rich and pure, and I really believe that’s something that we have to be very careful of, even in the bigger Body of evangelicalism because a lot of worship music is not doctrinally rich. It may be emotionally rich, it may be rather subjective, it may be seeing everything from inside our eyes and beseeching. We honor God and we instruct and build up each other when we sing to one another and sing to God the truth about Him and the truth of the gospel. Nikki, you were telling me something Alistair Begg said. Could you share that, please?
Nikki: Yeah. I heard it years ago, so I won’t be able to exactly quote him, but he said something along the lines of, “If you have somebody visiting your church and they only stay for the beginning part, where everybody’s worshiping in song, and they get up and leave when that’s gone, then they need to have heard the gospel truth proclaimed about who God is and what He did. That needs to have been a part of your worship, your singing service, and I thought that was really profound. It helped me in my thinking. And I don’t believe he would say that it’s wrong to sing songs that reflect your personal relationship with God, but that’s not the context. That’s not how we teach and admonish people about God, and in fact, the word “teaching” in that verse, its root is “didasko,” which is, in the New Testament, always related to teaching the Scripture.
Colleen: Isn’t that interesting. Now, you know, there’s one other thing this verse makes me remember. Years ago I remember our friend Steve Pitcher, who some of you know from his articles in Proclamation! about the Clear Word. He said once that you can always tell the beliefs of a cult by their hymnbooks or by the music that they use, and I remember the shock I had very, very early in our days of leaving Adventism, when I discovered that many of the common Christian hymns that we all know, that Christians know, that actually are printed in the Adventist hymnal, how many of those have had the words changed. It was a shock to me to discover that. Early on, for example, the hymn “Holy, Holy, Holy,” which ends “God in three persons, blessed Trinity,” was changed in the Adventist hymnal to “God over all who rules eternally.” The Trinity was taken right out of the song. Now, in the later version, 1984, that phrase was put back in, but in the later version of the Adventist hymnal, other hymns have been changed as well. There are hymns where verses having to do with the blood of Christ or the saints in glory, those verses are left completely out of the hymns so they don’t jar the worshipers. It’s really important to understand that just because we learned Christian hymns in Adventism doesn’t mean we learned Christian doctrine because sometimes words are subtly changed, sometimes words are left completely out, and sometimes words are completely changed. Religions will reflect their beliefs in their music, so as we leave Adventism it’s really important to learn these songs from their original sources. Sometimes I go online and compare the words to what was in the Adventist hymnal, just to see if I really got it right. But that’s a really significant thing that I didn’t know. I didn’t know I was being shaped by the hymns as an Adventist.
Nikki: That’s interesting that you bring up how they change the Trinity, because Arius had a song, didn’t he? Can you tell them about that?
Colleen: Arius was a third century heretic that said Jesus was not eternally almighty God the Son. He claimed that He was of a different substance than the Father and that He had a beginning sometime in the distant past. Now, that’s not a biblical truth. Athanasius was a bishop who was a contemporary of Arius, and he believed and knew that what Arius was teaching was false. Now, interestingly, Arius put his beliefs to words and to music and was teaching children to sing his song about Jesus having a beginning. As a counterpoint to Arius’ heresy and his teaching it through music, Athanasius wrote a song that we have come to know as the Gloria Patri.
Glory be to the Father
and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost,
as it was in the beginning,
is now and ever shall be,
world without end. Amen.
And those men knew something that implicitly the cults and Christians still know today. That is that if you put words to music, people will be far more likely to remember them than if they’re just words alone. And interestingly, as people sometimes age and become somewhat senile or demented, they are often able to sing the hymns they learned as children when they can no longer carry on a conversation. Those words are recorded in the brains along with the music. God knew what He was doing when He gave us the ability to sing truth in music, and that’s what this verse in Colossians is instructing us to do, to admonish us and to admonish each other with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs because putting truth to music will make it linger long in our minds. And finally, we come to verse 17, “Whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through Him to God the Father.” Now, how do you understand that now, Nikki?
Nikki: Well, I remember Gary Inrig talking about people who pray in the name of Jesus and how sometimes they’ll treat it like it’s punctuation or like it’s going to be the power that makes their prayer come true, like magical thinking, and he talked about how praying in the name of Jesus or doing things in the name of Jesus, it means representing Him and His will and His desires, and he likens it to ambassadors from other countries. When they come, they come in the name of, let’s say, the queen, and they come representing what’s important to her, what matters to her, what she sent them to do. And that is how we are to live. We live to and for Christ, and that’s how we live in everything that we do, and even in how we love and treat each other. It’s all in the name of and for the Lord Jesus.
Colleen: That’s a wonderful way to think of it. As born-again believers, what we do represents the Lord Jesus, and when we come to the Lord in prayer and worship, that’s part of what we do is we are representing ourselves as saved children of God, saved by the blood of Christ, and our requests are made known to Him on the basis of trusting Jesus and being God’s own children. I think of Philippians 4:5-7, “Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplications with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God” – there it is again – “which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” And it strikes me again how here in Colossians 3:17, just like in Philippians 4:5-7, again we get this command to give thanks. Of course we are to bring our requests to God. Of course we are to ask Him for His blessings and mercy and protection and provision, but always with thanks. And it strikes me that sometimes I don’t even know what to thank God for, and sometimes I literally thank Him for what I see around me, like “Thank you for giving me a safe place to live,” “Thank you for giving me a godly husband,” “Thank you for giving me your work to do.” And sometimes I just simply say, “Thank you for what you’re doing that I can’t see, because I know you’re at work, and I can’t see how this problem is going to be resolved, but I know it’s not a mystery to you, and it’s not a surprise to you,” and somehow that giving thanks is at the heart of everything we’re commanded to do in the name of Christ. We can thank Him because we’ve been born again through the living and enduring word of God and through the blood of Jesus. And if you haven’t trusted Jesus and His finished atonement and His sacrifice for your sin, if you haven’t submitted to His living word and believed what it says about Him, we just ask that you turn to the Lord because the way to the Father is opened, a new and living way is opened by the blood of Jesus, and even if you haven’t trusted Him, that way is open for you to come before Him and say, “Father, Lord, I know I need you. I know I’m a sinner, and I know I need the forgiving, cleansing blood of Jesus,” and if you haven’t done that, we just ask that you do it. And look again at these indicatives, these wonderful indicatives in Colossians 3, that when we’ve trusted Jesus, we’re made alive, where our lives are hidden with Christ in God. We are seated in heavenly places, and we are His.
Nikki: So again, if you have questions or comments for us, write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com, and don’t forget to visit proclamationmagazine.com to sign up for our weekly emails and to read our online magazine. Again, you can find a link there to donate if you’d like to come alongside us. Don’t forget to follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook, and leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. We look forward to visiting with you again next week as we look at the next section of Colossians.
Colleen: See you then.
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