In verses 24-29 Paul is going to talk about his work as a missionary, and in so doing he describes three essential aspects of authentic Christian ministry- a willing embrace of suffering, a clear proclamation of Christ, and a dependence on Christ for the doing of it all. We’ll be spending time with each of these ideas this Sunday. However, that verse, verse 24, really bothered me, and no matter how many times I read it I couldn’t seem to understand what it meant. Paul writes, “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church…” What did he mean by “what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions?” And how does Paul make up in his own flesh what was apparently lacking in Christ’s afflictions? At first blush, that sort of talk has the slight whiff of heresy, doesn’t it? Let’s give Paul the benefit of the doubt though. If we know one thing from reading Paul’s letters in our New Testament it is that he believed in the sufficiency of Jesus’ death to cover all our sins and that no person can add to that. So what did he mean?
Christ’s Afflictions
Download
(right click and choose save as)
During my recent vacation I read through the book of Colossians in my personal devotions. On July 31, I made the following entry in a journal of sorts that I keep, “This morning I spent time with God in Colossians. I struggled to concentrate though. I had to read portions over and over again because my mind kept drifting. I had no excuse. There were no distractions. How is it that I can read while simultaneously thinking about other things? I might marvel at the capacity of the human brain to multitask if that was truly what I was doing, but I was not. It cannot be said that I was multitasking if at the end of it I can’t recall a single word that I read. It’s true, you really cannot serve two masters. I was especially bothered by my inability to grasp the meaning of Colossians 1:24. I read and reread it a bunch of times. I turned it around, examining it from different angles, but at the end of all that I do not understand this verse.”