When Jay Reynardus was a young Christian, a mentor told him he ought to pick a life verse. He is, by his own description, an overly ambitious man, so he took a life passage instead. One verse was never going to be enough.
It is Psalm 119, starting at verse 33. Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things, and give me life in your ways. Confirm to your servant your promise, that you may be feared. Turn away the reproach that I dread, for your rules are good. He asks his wife to pray it over him every day.
He will tell you why. When he first came to faith he assumed the Christian life ran like an escalator stuck in the up direction — better, then holier, then holier still, until one day you arrive. Scripture calls us saints, after all. Sainthood sounded like a good place to be headed.
What he found instead was a spiral. The longer he walks with God, the more clearly he sees how faithless he is, how loveless he is, how many small hopes he has handed his heart to, one after another. "What amazes me over time is his faithfulness toward me," he said, "not mine toward him. His love toward me, not mine for him."
That is not a confession of failure. It is the argument of the whole letter Christchurch opened this Sunday. The real Jay, he said, is the one who points you away from Jay — "I'm a little thing" — and toward Jesus. He's the big thing.
The letter, and the trouble behind it
Colossae was a prosperous trade city where ideas from everywhere piled up in the same market. A man named Epaphras had heard Paul teach, gone home, and started a church there, and for a while it went beautifully. Then other teachers arrived and began stirring their own ideas into the gospel until nobody could tell which was which.
Epaphras did not know what to do, so he went to the one man he thought would. Paul was in a jail cell in Rome.
Sit with that. The man with no freedom, no platform and no way out is the one everybody writes to for help. Whatever Paul has, his circumstances cannot reach it.
And the first thing he does with it is give thanks.
Faith, hope and love are not your achievements
We always thank God... since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. Faith, hope and love. Paul says it here, he says it to the Thessalonians, he says it over and over. These are the marks of a person who belongs to God.
Which is exactly why Jay's confession matters. If he is faithless, that matters. If he is loveless, that matters. If his hopes are pointed at the wrong things, that matters a great deal.
But look at where Paul says these three things come from — the word of truth, the gospel. They arrive. The faithless are handed a faith. The loveless are handed a love they are free to spend on other people. Those with nothing left to hope in are handed a living hope. None of it is manufactured. All of it is given.
Jay stopped in the middle of this and told the room to get their phones out and write it down: you are a recipient of the grace of God, and the evidence is faith, hope and love. Then he said the quiet part. "Twenty minutes of this on a Sunday morning will not overcome twenty-five hours of Netflix throughout the week."
So go looking for the evidence this week. Where is the faith you did not have five years ago? Who do you love now that you once could not stand? What are you hoping in that no headline can take away from you? Put your finger on it, and say out loud where it came from.
Pray the prayer Paul prays
Then Paul prays for them, and the prayer is worth stealing. That you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord.
Jay's answer for why we do not have it is the one James gives: you do not have it because you do not ask for it. Our prayers tend to run small and stay about us — this job, this raise, that house in the Keys. Not this one. God, let me see you. God, show me my sin. God, how can you still love me? God, give me faith, because I do not have it. Save my children. Save my neighbors. Save this city.
And then Paul stacks up what has already been done, so quickly that it is easy to miss. You have been qualified to share an inheritance. You have been delivered out of the domain of darkness. You have been transferred into the kingdom of his Son. You have been redeemed. You have been forgiven. Every one of those verbs is finished. Not one of them is a project you are working on.
He wants to be known
Here is where the morning landed.
God desires to be known. He wants it so much that he became flesh. He wants it so much that he was crucified where you could see it, so that you could know how far the love actually goes. He wants it so much that he gave us the apostles, and this book, and then reached into the dark place where you were living, while you were still his enemy, and pulled you out.
That is the only thing that has ever moved anyone from faithless to faithful, from hopeless to hopeful, from hard-hearted to loving. Not a technique. Not a better week. Him.
Which is why the small hopes lose their grip the moment you see it clearly. "Only when we begin to see the light does the darkness dispel," Jay said. "Only when we begin to live for a new and living hope do those small hopes get revealed for the liars that they are."
Whatever you are carrying this week may be genuinely heavy. Paul wrote this letter from a jail cell, and it never once occurs to him that his situation is the headline.
It's him. It's always him. It will always be him.
