Theological Commentary: Click Here
Discipleship Focus: Up
- Up: Up is the word we use for what we worship. If we are following God’s will, God will occupy the Up position. Our life, our identity, our mission, our family on mission is all derived from Up. This is why God needs to be in our Up position.
In
Colossians 2 we get a really good chapter in a discussion of what should be at
the center of our lives. It should be
Christ. Christ is the crucial element. Christ’s death on the cross is what brings us
our salvation. He is the key. He and His sacrificial love as a great
display of God’s grace should be the center in our worship of the Father. There is nothing greater than Christ, is
there?
Then I
hear Paul’s words to the Colossians. Don’t
let people intimidate you. Don’t let
them pull you away from the truth. Don’t
let them minimize your testimony. The
food we eat isn’t as important as Christ.
The place we worship isn’t as important as Christ. Our reverence of angels certainly isn’t as
important as Christ. The amount of
knowledge we have is nowhere near as important as Christ. I can continue, but I think you hear Paul’s
advice to the Colossians. People want to
say Christ is the center, but as soon as you are different than them it is easy
to see barriers go up and somehow Christ just isn’t the center anymore.
This isn’t
just an issue in Paul’s day, either. Don’t
we allow things to divide us when Christ should unify us? Do we ever let education divide us? Or method of baptism? Or method for communion? Or translation of the Bible? Or even what we wear to church? We may have come a long ways in our culture,
but the truth is that human problems are still human problems.
We need
to stop worship those things we can see as differences. We need to stop empowering that which divides
us and disqualifies other people in our estimation. We need to confess our error, turn to Christ,
and worship the Father in Christ with our brothers and sisters in Christ. That’s what Up should be all about.
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