What is Spiritual Reality?

I want to tell you about a man who had a hard time holding down a full-time job. He was employed in a lot of different places, but he didn’t stick in any one of them for very long.

• His first job was working in an orange juice factory, but he got canned because he couldn’t concentrate.

• Then he went off to work in the woods as a lumberjack, but he just couldn’t hack it, so they gave him the axe.

• After that, he tried to be a tailor, but he just wasn’t suited for it.—and it was only a so-so job anyway.

• So he tried working in a muffler repair shop, but he came home every day exhausted.

• He decided to go to barber school, but he just couldn’t cut it there.

• So he figured he’d try being a chef—thought it would add a little spice to his life—but that didn’t pan out either.

• He tried becoming a commercial fisherman, but he found that he wasn’t able to live on his net income.

• He worked for a while for a pool maintenance company, but the work was just too draining.

• After all those years of trying to find steady work he finally got a job as a historian. But then he realized that there was no future in it.

• Now he’s working for the local Starbucks, but I don’t think he’s going to last too long there, because every day he goes to work, it’s the same old grind.

When it comes to searching for spiritual reality, many people are like that guy—they go from one thing to another, trying to find something that fits, something that feels right, something that really meets their needs.

And a lot of people aren’t sure exactly what it is they’re looking for—they just know that there must be more to this life—there must be a dimension to life that transcends the here and now. Having a big house and a good job, a BMW in the driveway and lots of money in the bank might feel good for awhile, but the buzz wears off pretty quickly, and then where are you?

So more Canadians than ever before are searching for spiritual reality.

This past week, a new attraction opened in Trinity Square Park in downtown Toronto just by the Eaton Centre. It’s called a labyrinth. Now a labyrinth is something like a maze, but it doesn’t have walls and it doesn’t have any blind alleys. It’s a pathway that is cut into the grass, and it leads to a central goal.

And some people feel that, by walking this labyrinth, they can have a spiritual experience. In fact, the Anglican bishop of Toronto declared that this labyrinth in Trinity Park would become “a center for spirituality, whatever your faith or no faith.”

People in the 21st century are looking to make a connection with the spiritual dimension of life. And they’re no different from the people who lived in the 1st century A.D. in the Roman Empire.

We saw last week that those people were looking for spiritual reality, and just like us in the 21st century, they had a lot of options from which to choose. There were organized religions, and unorganized religions, there were pagan cults and philosophical systems from which to choose. And a lot of people just tried to blend elements of all of them together to form a spiritual framework for their lives.

Now there were a group of Christians living in a little town back in the boondocks of Asia Minor who found themselves in the middle of all this. They lived in the little town of Colosse and they were surrounded by this spiritual smorgasbord. And they began to wonder whether following Jesus Christ alone was enough.

People were telling them: Come on. Open up your eyes. There are a lot of different ways to find spiritual reality. Jesus might be one of those ways, but there are lots more ways besides. You shouldn’t be so narrow; you shouldn’t be so exclusive. You’ve got to understand that in the spiritual world—just as in the social world—there’s diversity.

So the Colossians were asking “What is spiritual reality? And how do we get there?”

The Apostle Paul heard about their struggle, and he wrote a letter to them—it’s Paul’s letter to the Colossians that we find in our Bibles. And over the next few weeks, we’re going to be exploring it. Because we live in the same kind of world that the Colossians lived in—a world of incredible diversity; a world in which there are many spiritual alternatives claiming to be the pathway to spiritual reality. And we’re faced with the same questions that they were facing. Is Jesus alone the way?

In the section of Colossians we want to look at today, Paul reveals that there are five aspects of spiritual reality. We’re looking at Colossians 1:9-14.

1. Relationship - 9

For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you and asking God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding.

It was Paul’s desire that the Colossians know God. This was the central focus of his prayers: That they would know God’s will—literally, that they would be filled with the knowledge of his will.

Now this implies that God is knowable, that he is a person who can be known and with whom we can have a relationship.

Some people say that there is no God, so it’s impossible to know someone who doesn’t exist. The material universe is all that there is, and there isn’t anyone or anything behind it, or beyond it. So it’s pointless to talk about “knowing God”. This view is called atheism—a belief in no God.

The only problem I have with this view is: How could an impersonal universe have produced beings like us who have personality, identity, self-awareness, who have a sense of our own uniqueness and individuality, beings who have a moral consciousness, and who have, above all, this yearning for transcendence—this desire to connect with, and relate to, someone or something beyond the universe? How could such beings have come into existence as the result of a random combination of molecules? It just doesn’t seem plausible to me.

There are other people who say that there is something outside the universe, driving it, controlling it, but that “something” is impersonal—it is a force. You’ll recognize this view from the theme of Star Wars. “Use the Force, Luke.” This is the belief in an impersonal God—a belief that is sometimes called “deism”.

But this view has the same problem as atheism. How do you account for the presence of personal, relational, spiritually-inclined beings in an impersonal universe run by an impersonal Force?

The Bible proposes a third view. That there is indeed Someone outside this universe, and He is personal, he is knowable. He has personality and personhood. And that is the reason why we, as human beings, have within us a desire, a yearning, for spiritual connection. The personal God put it there. He created us to be like him so that we could have a relationship with him.

That’s why Paul says: “I want you to know him.” As a personal being, God has a mind, God has intelligence, God has feelings, and God has a will. And Paul says “I want you to know his will.”

What does it mean to know someone’s will? It means to know what he wants; to know what is in his heart. Knowing someone’s will comes from having an intimate relationship with that person.

Remember the old TV show called The Newlywed Game. On that show, they would take couples who had recently been married. And they would separate the husbands and wives and then ask them a series of questions. What’s his favourite restaurant? Where would she most want to go on a vacation? etc.

And then they would bring the couples back together and compare answers to see how well they really knew each other. Knowing someone’s will, knowing someone’s desires, knowing their heart happens in the context of an ongoing relationship.

So when Paul says “I want you to be filled with the knowledge of God’s will” he’s saying that he wants the Colossian Christians to grow deeper in their relationship with this personal, knowable God—so that what’s on God’s mind would be on their minds.

But he doesn’t leave it at that: he says “I want you to know God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding.” We believe that God revealed his will to us in the Bible. We don’t believe that the Bible is a human book originated by human authors; we believe that it is a supernatural book written by a Divine Author, who revealed it to human authors so that they could record it.

In that sense, the concepts and the principles of the Bible come from outside the system; they don’t come from inside the system. It always amazes me that the Bible always presents concepts and principles and ways of living that are just the opposite of the way I would naturally think. That’s because the Bible is outside information—it came from the mind of God not from the mind of man.

Now there are many people who know the facts of the Bible. They know the content. They can recite it, they can talk about it, they can theologize and theorize about it. So in that sense, you might say that they know the will of God.

But they don’t know it with “all spiritual wisdom and understanding”. It isn’t making a difference in how they live. They’re walking around with it in their heads, but they don’t have it in their hearts and in their life. That’s because spiritual reality entails more than just knowing God’s will intellectually. It entails applying it practically. That’s what wisdom is: it’s knowledge applied. And we have a responsibility to apply that knowledge of God’s will.

The first facet of spiritual reality is relationship. The second facet is

2. Responsibility - 10

“We pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and may please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God”

It isn’t enough just to know the Bible; you have to live the Bible if you want to experience spiritual reality. Paul said “I’m praying that you would know God’s will so that you would DO God’s will—that you would live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way and bear fruit for him.”

Jesus said “He who has my words and keeps them—He’s the one who loves me.”

You know where the organized Christian church in North America has gone wrong in the past hundred years? We’ve had his words, but we haven’t kept them. We’ve known his will, but we haven’t done it.

So it’s no wonder that people are turning away from the Christian church in their search for spiritual reality. They’re not finding it here because we haven’t taken our responsibilty seriously. If we preach the Bible but we don’t live the Bible, we just turn people off. We are inauthentic.

Spiritual reality is about Relationship—it’s about knowing God. But it’s about Responsibility—it’s about living in obedience to what God has told us to do. And if we do that, we experience the third component of spiritual reality…

3. Resources - 11

“being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience”

The Olympic Games are now underway in Sydney, Australia. And there has been a great controversy surrounding these Games over the matter of “performance enhancing drugs”. Some athletes have been taking drugs which they are convinced give them greater strength, better endurance, more explosive power, etc..

What Paul is talking about here is not performance enhancing drugs; he’s talking about the supernatural power of God that will enable us to do things that we never thought we could do.

Now I’m not talking about goofy things like handling snakes or walking on hot coals. I’m talking about the kind of resources we need in order to live the way God wants us to live.

God wants to give us supernatural love so that we can love people who are unlovely. He wants to give us supernatural patience so that we can endure situations and circumstances that would normally bring overwhelm us.

And as we know God and obey God, He will give us access to these resources.

4. Reward - 12

One of the greatest tragedies connected with the Olympic Games happened back in 1988. A Russian female athlete competed in her event and won the gold medal. Then she went back home to Russia and committed suicide. Because she looked at what she had devoted her entire life to achieving, and she realized that it was nothing more than that little piece of shiny metal that she held in her hand.

What about you? Are you going to live your whole life and come to the end of it and say “Is that all there is?”

Spiritual reality is about knowing God, it’s about living for God, it’s about having resources from God, and it’s about having something to look forward to when this life is over.

“…giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light.”

He’s talking about heaven. Last week, I buried two people. Is that all there is? You live your whole life only to end up in a box in the ground?

No. The Bible says that God has something much better planned for us when our life on earth is over. It’s eternal life in heaven with Him. That’s your inheritance if you know God. He has qualified you to share in that inheritance. He has given you your entrance ticket, which was paid for by Jesus Christ.

Why did Jesus Christ pay for your entrance ticket? Why couldn’t you pay for your own? It’s because of the last thing you need to experience in order to experience spiritual reality.

5. Redemption - 13,14

For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

You’ve probably heard the saying “To err is human; to forgive divine”. No truer statement has ever been made!

To err is human. We have all done things that are wrong. Oh, we try to justify ourselves, we try to make excuses for why we did what we did, but when you come right down to it—we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. We haven’t lived the way God wants us to live. And that separates us from God. That’s what keeps us from knowing spiritual reality.

So here’s the dilemma: we want to know spiritual reality, we want to be “connected” on that level—but we are cut off from the Source of spiritual reality by our sin.

But to forgive is divine. And God has forgiven us. He has forgiven us by sending his son Jesus to pay for our sins and to bring us back to God. That’s why we talk about Jesus being our Redeemer.

And if you ever want to know spiritual reality, this is how you get it. You get it by being redeemed.

So this is what Paul wanted for the Colossians.

• He wanted them to know God.

• He wanted them to live according to God’s will for their lives.

• He wanted them to experience the supernatural resources that God would give them.

• He wanted them to look forward to the glorious future that awaited them with God in heaven.

• He wanted them to remember that it was all because of Jesus that they could be in such a relationship in the first place.

Now you may be saying: That’s all well and good if you’re a Christian. That’s the Christian understanding of how you can know spiritual reality. But there are other ways—there are other religions, other beliefs. Who are you to say that the Christian way is the only way?

Well, in order to answer that question, we’ll have to come back next week. Because Paul is going to go on to show us why Jesus is not only the way to spiritual reality—He’s the only way.