God’s Word for You

Colossians 4:17-18 Amen

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Saturday, December 14, 2019

17 Tell Archippus: “See to it that you accomplish the ministry you have received in the Lord.”

Archippus is called “our fellow soldier” in Philemon 2. We think that he was the pastor of the Colossian church. Why would Paul ask the Colossian Christians to pass along a message like this, when Archippus himself would probably be the one to read the letter aloud to the Colossians?

First, Paul does not want the church to have the mistaken idea that the pastor is answerable to a superior like Paul. The pastor is called by the congregation, and in a sense is answerable to that congregation for his faithfulness to his call, which has come from God through them.

Second, Paul wants the congregation to understand that the scope of their pastor’s call is the ministry he has “received from the Lord.” Many churches add all sorts of additional duties to the work that their pastors do. This should not be the case. If he is not gifted with the ability to delegate such things, they should supply him with another worker (like the “seven men” in Acts 6) to assist him.

One congregation I know of once asked its pastor to keep track of everything he did during a month so that they could see it all on paper. They wanted him to break down types of phone calls and visits he made, whether driving time was for one reason or another, and if he was in his office working on a sermon or preparing for a Bible class (they refused to believe that he would spend time in his office for any other reason). They were treating him like an untrustworthy servant who had to prove that what he did was worthwhile. He said: “I gave up after five or six days. I couldn’t keep up with the demands they made as to whether I was dividing my time between the [various] boards. Just recording everything added hours to my week. If they really wanted to know this, then they should have volunteered to tag along with me and try to keep up.”

Third, Paul emphasizes that the ministry of a pastor is “in the Lord.” The word “in” (Greek en) means that what a pastor does is within the sphere of Jesus’ ministry. “The minister should ever be conscious of this fact, and therefore hold himself in duty bound to do nothing that may go against the interest of his Lord, but to act only in conformity to the will of the Lord as revealed in Scripture” (The Wenzel Commentary Vol II, p. 187).

A pastor is responsible for administering to his congregation the means of grace: the gospel in word and sacrament. The divine call means that he is called by God and charged by the congregation to proclaim the gospel publicly on behalf of the calling congregation (Acts 6:3-5; Titus 1:5). The congregation might be a local church, a school or college, a special institution such as a ministry for jails, for prisoners of war, for the elderly, or for a whole church body such as a synod or a district of a synod, and one ministry might be very different in scope from another (1 Corinthians 12:28). A pastor has no right (indeed, no one has) to go into another church without a call and preach there, even if that church has been fed false doctrine. The false teacher can be confronted, but this should begin within the congregation itself if possible.

Paul says much more about the doctrine of the call and about the role of pastors and teachers in his letters to Timothy and Titus.

18 THIS GREETING IN MY OWN HAND IS FROM ME: PAUL.

Paul sometimes signs his letters with his own signature. We see this in the sentence above, and in similar passages in other letters: 1 Corinthians 16:21; Galatians 6:11; 2 Thessalonians 3:17; Philemon 19. I have placed it in capital letters to show that it would have looked different, written in a different hand.

Not everyone who is masterful with words is also masterful at penmanship. Paul seems to have used a kind of secretary or amanuensis (scribe) to write out his letters as he dictated them. Jeremiah had a secretary named Baruch: “While Jeremiah dictated all the words the Lord had spoken to him, Baruch wrote them on the scroll” (Jeremiah 36:4). In Romans 16:22, such a scribe adds: “I, Tertius, who wrote down this letter, greet you in the Lord.” Not everyone used such a secretary. John, for example, clearly says: “This is the disciple who testifies to these things and who wrote them down” (John 21:24; see also Revelation 22:8-10).

Remember my chains. Grace be with you. Amen.

Roman prisoners were chained to their guards. Perhaps Paul’s actual chain had touched the paper as he wrote the greeting above, calling it to mind more keenly. He doesn’t want the Colossians to feel sorry for him, but to remember the holy purpose for his imprisonment. He had seized an opportunity to preach the gospel before Caesar himself, and he was waiting for his moment to arrive. Perhaps such a moment did happen, or perhaps not. We know that Paul was released from this imprisonment and wrote 1 Timothy and Titus later on, and that when he finally wrote 2 Timothy in 67 or 68 AD, he was in chains once again.

He ends with, “Grace be with you. Amen.” Grace is God’s love, a love we do not deserve, but which we have because of God’s compassion for us. Grace is God’s good favor or mercy by which he blesses us and saves us from sin, death and the devil’s power. God’s grace is summarized perfectly in Psalm 130: “If you, O LORD, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness” (Psalm 130:3-4).

“Amen” is not present here in every single manuscript, especially some of the more famous Egyptian codices, but it is found in Codex Aleph and other ancient copies along with the Latin and Syriac versions. Also, it does no violence to the text. “Amen” means “This is most certainly true,” and so it is a fitting word with which to end a letter, a sermon, or a prayer.

In every part of this letter, Paul has emphasized the glorious Christ, who is the head of the church. May we do the same in our public and private preaching and teaching, as we share our faith with our families and loved ones, and as we live to God’s glory and await the resurrection to everlasting life.

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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