A couple weeks ago I started a new sermon series at church through the book of Colossians. If you are interested, you can find the sermons here. This past Sunday we spent some time looking carefully at 1:9-14, which is the second part of Paul's prayer for the believers in the church at Colossae. His prayer request for them is clear: "to be filled with the knowledge of His will..." In the context, Paul thinks of God's will not in an individualistic sense, like some sort of personal itinerary for our lives, but in a redemptive sense. God's will is that sinners will come to Christ, that through Christ God will reconcile all things to Himself (1:20). In other words, you can substitute the phrase "God's will" for the word "gospel" to get the sense of the verse.
Paul is praying that believers will be filled will knowledge concerning the gospel, concerning God's redemptive work in the world. This knowledge is not just fact; it is a personal encounter with truth. It is something you know and feel, something that informs you and moves you.
The word "filled" can mean "to saturate," so I take Paul's request to mean that we are to saturate our minds in the truth of the gospel. We are to constantly be meditating on, studying, pondering and considering the good news of Jesus Christ. We will never get to the bottom of the well of gospel truth. The gospel is like a multi-faceted jewel; the more you turn it and study it, the more you realize there is so much more to know.
I challenged our folks to saturate their minds in the gospel. But how does that happen? The answer is rather simple--by exposing our minds to the gospel. We do that by reading and studying the Bible rightly, not by looking for life principles to make life work better, not by making the characters of the Bible heroes for us to emulate, and not by searching for secret mysteries that take us to deeper levels of spirituality. The Bible has one overarching story that it tells from Genesis to Revelation, and that story is about how the God of the Bible redeems sinners through the death and resurrection of His Son Jesus Christ. In other words, the Bible is all about the person and work of Jesus, or the gospel.
So, if we are going to saturate our minds in the gospel then we are going to have to give ourselves to the reading and studying of Scripture. This should happen both individually and communally. We need to cultivate the discipline of personal Bible study, but we also need to make sure that we are reading and studying the Bible in the context of our faith community. This means we should sit under the preaching of the Word when the saints gather to worship, and we should be connected to a small group where the Bible is studied.
But we also need to give ourselves to reading good books that encourage us in the gospel. For a couple thousand years now, Christians have been writing books to help their brothers and sisters enjoy and savor the richness of the gospel. All of us can make time to read and study good gospel books for our edification and sanctification. We live among a thousand distractions, and we waste a lot of time watching TV, surfing the internet, or searching through social media. If we are going to saturate our minds in the gospel, then we are going to have to make time to read gospel rich books, and thankfully there are many to choose from. In a future blog post I will list some that I recommend.
Sadly, the Christian community has also produced some really terrible books that actually twist the gospel, minimize it, ignore it, or flat out deny it. Let me end this blog post by pointing you to another blog that will be helpful to you as you think about reading good gospel books. Here is the video:
