Here’s my longer sermon notes from this morning’s Metro Christian Centre service (dated 18th June 2023), continuing our series in the letter Colossians.
You can also catch up with this via MCC’s YouTube channel (just give us time to get the video uploaded).
‘We are proud individuals, living for the city | but the flames couldn’t go much higher | We find gods and religions to paint us with salvation | but no one, no nobody, can give you the power to rise, over love, over hate.’ – Paulo Nutini, Iron Sky[i]
READ: COLOSSIANS 2:6—15 (NLT)
CARROTS
If I asked you what colour a carrot is, you’d rightly say, ‘orange’.
400 years ago, however, no one would have said that. Back then, carrots were generally purple, and, if you scavenged around in the wild, you would find a few yellow and white varieties here and there.
Then something revolutionary happened to change all that.
In the sixteenth century, the Dutch lowlands declared independence from their Spanish overlords. William the Silent, later known as William I, was the leader of this rebellion and its instigator. He was also Prince of a territory called Orange. As the story goes, William did not live to see the Dutch gain independence. Nevertheless, he is revered by the Dutch as the father of their nation. The House of Orange still rules the Netherlands today.
In gratitude, the Dutch took to the colour orange in a huge way. It’s a symbolic colour for them, a colour that speaks of their national pride. If you find yourself in the Netherlands at the end of any April, you will see orange everywhere.
Dutch independence is why our carrots are orange.
Over the 100 years following their independence (in 1648), Dutch farmers took the wild yellow varieties of carrot and started selectively breeding them to produce orange carrots.[ii]
So here we are, some 400 years later, still growing and eating orange carrots. If someone put a purple carrot in front you, we would all say it just looks funky. The old has gone, you could say, and the new has come and we have happily embraced the new.
If you didn’t already know this, then I assure you, you’ll never look at a carrot the same way again.
We could call what happened to the carrot branding. Yes, long before the age of Tiktok, and Apple, long before Bird’s Custard and EasyJet, branding and marketing existed. But, more than this, it’s really about making ourselves known.
Actually, from the moment the first human handprint was imprinted on an ancient cave wall, humanity has sought to shape and express our identities and our stories in some way.
In a way, we are all like carrots.
Like orange carrots selectively bred by Dutch farmers, we all, in some way, select what is important in defining who we are and how we express who we are.
IDENTITIES & LORDSHIP
There was once a great thinker and anthropologist, called Ernest Becker, who wrote a prize-winning book called The Denial of Death.
I know, it’s a lovely title, right?
Within the book, Becker makes the argument that every human’s need for self-worth is ‘the condition for its life.’
Basically, he’s saying that from the moment we are born, we try to make sense of the world and our place in it. As we grow and develop from babies to toddlers, from teenagers to adults, this desire to know our place in the world never leaves us. It haunts us. Every person, Becker argues, is seeking what he calls ‘cosmic significance.’[iii]
He’s not saying that we want to be somebody famous—someone of a cosmic scale. He is saying we simply want to be someone in all of this. To put that another way: we want an identity.
We want to know that our existence has not been in vain. We don’t want to be worthless. We want to know who we are and so we constantly seek for something to complete us, something or someone to reinforce our significance, whether that something is external to us or internal in us.
In other words, our desire for significance, to be someone, means that all of us will naturally live for something.
Becker states that this desire for worth is so powerful that, essentially, whatever we live for, whatever we select to base our identity and value on, we will ‘deify’. We make it ‘god’. ‘We will look to it with all the passion and intensity of worship and devotion, even if we [consider] ourselves as highly irreligious.’[iv]
Becker is not making a case for God, or trying to promote having a faith in a god. He was an atheist. But he recognised that humans religiously seek out things to redeem us and, to use the lyrics of a favourite song of mine, ‘paint us with salvation.’
He’s right, I feel. Our society often claims to be suspicious of religion and that religion is fading out, and yet, from what I observe, we have never been more religious. Religious behaviour, worship, devotion, zeal and the idea of a ‘cause’ has never been as popular as it is today. Religious life is bigger and more excessive than ever. There are more ‘gods’ today than in the ancient past. Especially in the so-called “enlightened” and atheistic West.
Becker uses various examples, from romantic experiences to our career and pleasure. We place the burden of ‘godhead’ on such things, hoping that if we live for them then we will find fulfilment and meaning in them.
But, Becker notes, if things like this become our ‘All’, when our worth is ultimately tied up in them, then when we discover their shortcomings it becomes a major threat to our own identity, our own sense of worth. When these things fail us, or when we fail to live up to the standards they require, we will feel condemned to nothingness.[v] We will have an identity crisis and experience despair.
The late Pastor and Teacher, Tim Keller, in his book, The Reason for God, picking up on Becker’s work, makes the point that in more traditional cultures, our identity is normally based on fulfilling our family’s or society’s expectations of you. In more modern western cultures, we tend to look to our achievements, our social status, our talents and our love relationships to define who we are.[vi] I’d add to that list, and say that some of us get our sense of ‘self’ from our material goods, our looks and physique, and our likes on social media.
Whatever the source, it comes with a burden. If your identity is built upon having wealth, or beauty, or a successful career, or fulfilling family expectations, then we understand that those things set up a standard that we must live up to by which we get that identity. We have to earn and perform for it. And when we fail to live up to that standard, these things are very unforgiving.
So, if you live for your career and you don’t do well, you’ll feel like a failure the rest of your life.
If your identity is based on beauty, and you don’t live up to the standards of what you think is beautiful and refined, then you’ll feel ugly all the time. In addition, because our culture’s standard of what is beautiful consistently changes, you’ll never actually reach your goal. And when you wake up one morning and recognise that you’re getting old… well, it’s like we’re being erased.
If you live to be popular, to be well liked by everyone, and then you hear something bad about you, when you realise that there is someone who does not like you (and I assure, there will be someone), it will nag and nag at you as you try to figure out why they don’t like you.
It may even change you: You’ll try and change so they do like ‘you’, but in doing so, ‘you’ stops becoming you and you will be aware that they don’t like you, but only the ‘you’ you’re pretending to be. On the other hand, the fact they don’t like you may cause you to not like them back. You may even encourage others not to like them as well. So even though popularity is your goal, unpopularity is the master you’re serving.
I’m speaking from experience.
Whatever it is, whenever you fail at whatever standard you’re living to, it will punish you. Again, we feel condemned to nothingness. We will carry an enormous sense of guilt.
Wrongly, some people think that following God is about walking around pursued by guilt. But we are all being pursued by guilt, our own guilt, trying to live up to some standard by which to achieve our identity.
And so I have to ask, what are you building your identity on?
What are you rooted in?
What are you living for?
Who do you think you are and how is that working out for you?
NOURISHED BY THE NEW
In the passage we’ve read this morning, Paul wants the Colossians to get there roots into Jesus, and to keeping building their lives on Jesus. He wants them to nourish themselves and to stabilize themselves with who Jesus is (Col. 2:6-7). Paul wants them to know that they are complete in their union with Jesus Christ (Col. 1:10).
These sentences all speak of their identity. Paul says a similar thing again in verse 3 of chapter 3, when he reminds them that their real life is hidden with Christ in God.
In other words, with Jesus as Lord of your life, you discover your truest self. The searching and striving can cease.
In the verses that follow what we read, Col. 2:11-15, Paul will talk about why they can be confident of this, and why they don’t need to be driven by the guilt-laden anxieties that the ascetic practices of the false teachers are attempting push onto them, that he mentions in Col. 2:16-23. We’ll look at this more next time.
But, in short, they can be confident of this because of Jesus’ supremacy—the things I touched on the other week (see CHRIST | UNRIVALLED SUPREMACY). In this passage, Paul repeats what he has already said when he began singing about Jesus in chapter 1: Jesus’ Deity (v. 9), that Jesus is God; Jesus is King of Creation (v. 10b), so in Jesus you already have the highest, greatest and the best; and, most importantly here, Jesus’ supreme victory on the cross (v. 11-15).
Paul wants the Colossians to know who they are—who they really are. He wants them to remember, in a way that it becomes foundational to in their lives, that who they are, their truest self, is not a product of what they have done or what they have achieved. Rather, it’s found, and can be only found, in what Jesus has done for them.
Paul focuses on the cross, because he wants them to grasp the work of Jesus’ cross in their lives.
Again, we’ll say more about verses 11-15 next time. But, in the larger framework of this letter, the work of Jesus on the cross isn’t merely about forgiveness. It includes forgiveness, for sure. But, it’s more than this. It’s restoration. It’s renewal. It’s new creation. It’s about identity. It’s God making us into the people we were originally created to be. God reconciling us, as Paul has already said in this letter, into the identity he intended us to have from the very beginning.
We were made for God. Not just to believe that there is a God, in some vague general sense. But, to love God supremely, to centre our lives on God above anything else.
And as the African church father, Augustine put it, our hearts are restless until the rest in God.
In the 19th century, the Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard wrote a book called The Sickness Unto Death.
Another cheerful title for a book!
Long before Ernest Becker talked about our search for identity and our desire for worth, Kierkegaard had already talked about the perpetual nagging despair we feel trying to know who we are.
As Kierkegaard put it, ‘…to have a self, to be a self, is the greatest concession made to man, but at the same time it is eternity’s demand upon him.’[vii]
As a Christian, Kierkegaard rooted the problem of our despair as our desire to become our self, to discover an identity, apart from God.
This was his definition of sin.
Rightly, and in a way that aligns with the scriptures, he didn’t see sin as primarily a matter of breaking rules—this is merely a symptom. Kierkegaard understood sin to be a severing of a relational tie. ‘He saw it as [humanity] seeking to establish a sense of self by making something else more central to our significance, purpose and happiness than [our] relationship to God.’[viii]
Kierkegaard also recognised, as Ernest Becker would come to do, that our attempt to establish an identity means that we will live for something to complete us, to redeem us. Although we decentralise God, we still seek to have a ‘god’ of our own making as the centre of our existence.
And, like the atheist, Ernest Becker, Kierkegaard, too, noted that when that something, this ‘god’, fails us, or we fail to meet its demands, we will discover that the things we thought would define us and deliver us from despair actually condemn us to feeling more worthless. Our ‘gods’ punish us.
Furthermore, even if we do get what we hoped, we still feel despair because we discover that even with that thing, we are still us.[ix]
As a character in a Neil Gaiman book put it, “It’s like the people who believe they’ll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn’t work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.”[x]
Whatever we live for, you still take ‘you’ with you.
You get the dream career, but you’re still you, and not the ‘you’ you hoped to be.
You get the relationship, thinking they would redeem you. But it’s still you.
So we don’t change, we just travel.
Again, I’m saying that from experience.
To repeat what I said before: God made us in his image. To be loved by him and to love him. To reflect God’s beauty and creativity and wonder. We are only truly complete in our union with God, not in our idols.
There’s a Hebrew word t’shuva. It turns up all over the Old Testament and the New.
The Old Testament Prophets use it frequently. Jesus used it when he talked about God’s Kingdom. And, after his resurrection, the early Christians used it when talking about our reception of this Kingdom through Jesus.
T’shuva is a word we often translate as repent. But so much baggage gets put on that word that it loses its original direction. It simply means return. It simply means to come home.
God’s desire is that we return to who we were originally created to be before we swerved off course to chase our little ‘gods’. That we would stop trying to perform and earn an identity from something that only pays out in condemning us to nothingness, and start living in the reality of who God has made us to be.
The thing is, unlike our attempts of searching for an identity, our true identity is not something we can earn and achieve and perform for and shop for and work for—it’s a gift from God. It’s the work of God alone.
This identity is something we receive.
If I was to paraphrase Paul’s words in Colossians 2:6-7, I would put it this way, ‘Just as you received Jesus, keep receiving Jesus. Nourish yourself in what he has done for you. Build yourself in the identity he gives. Don’t be distracted by the people telling you to pursue yourself elsewhere. Get established in the identity God gives you in Christ!’
Paul, like all the early Christians, is consistently insisting that because of Jesus’ lordship, because of his victory on the cross, something in our identity has profoundly changed and reconfigured forever. Because of our union with Christ in his death, something within in us has died. At the same time, because of our union with Christ in his resurrection, something within in us has come alive.
As Paul puts it elsewhere, ‘In Christ’ there has been a new creation, the old has gone. And all this newness of life is from God, who brought us back to himself through what Christ did (2 Cor. 5:17-18).
It’s not that you or me are now perfect, or that we’ve have never done any wrong, or that we will never struggle or stumble or get things wrong. But, because of Jesus, who you and I were originally made to be has been renewed.
I am not who I was. I am in Christ. If you want to know what it means to be a Christian, well, I could put it this way: Christians are people who are learning who they are in Christ. I’ve stopped seeking self; I’m seeking to know Jesus more and more.
Paul wants the Colossians, and us, to get our roots into this new identity, to explore it and unpack it and allow what God has done for us and said about us shape what we believe about ourselves. Live as if you are complete, because in relation to the fullness of God in Jesus, you are complete.
You don’t have to go searching for an identity, seeking and living for other things to complete you—regardless if they are good or bad. Jesus is Lord. Let his lordship be at the centre of your life.
If we grasp this, our lives won’t be driven or dominated by some anxiety and despair over our ‘cosmic significance’. Instead, as Paul notes (in Col. 2:7b), our lives will overflow with thanksgiving.
THE WRETCHED
I’m reminded of two fictional characters.
One of them is the monster made by Dr. Frankenstein, in the book by Mary Shelley. The ‘monster’ isn’t made because of how Dr. Frankenstein forms him from various cadavers in a laboratory. Rather, the ‘monster’ comes into existence because, when it comes alive, it’s maker screams and abandons it.
The monster becomes monstrous because it is searching for acceptance, value and an identity. The creature’s life is characterised with haunting and stalking others, and its desire for self worth causes it to be consistently overpowering. In its search for love, it becomes more and more unloving. It’s so dominated in its self-interest, in being accepted, that it is incapable of laying it’s self down for others.
This is a dead life, a monstrous life that promotes an infatuation with self.
In contrast, in Victor Hugo’s, Les Misérables, there’s another character, Jean Valjean, who also finds himself in a wretched condition.
He too has known unacceptance, and he too searched to be valued. And when he wasn’t embraced by others, it also turned his heart against others.
One day, he encounters the welcome of Bishop Charles-François-Bienvenu Myriel, who invites Valjean to stay the night. Jean Valjean, however, in his state of despair, in his self-interest, steals from the Bishop. He is then arrested for it, and destined to more imprisonment, more nothingness. Ultimately, a dead life that promotes more of this infatuation with self.
However, the Bishop doesn’t want this for Valjean. So, Bienvenu forgives him and grants him freedom.
It’s not that the Bishop has accepted or approved of Valjean’s self-absorption. Rather, he embraces him regardless of it. In doing so, the Bishop demonstrates an identity better than self-interest, but of Christ-like selfless love. It’s a life-changing moment for Jean Valjean. In the forgiveness of Bishop Myriel, Valjean is given a new life, a new identity. And Valjean receives it.
Valjean nourishes himself in the radical acceptance, radical forgiveness, and radical love he is shown. He doesn’t use this radical love to nourish his old self. Rather he allows it transform him from the inside out. He stops searching for his identity. He stops being driven by insecurity or unacceptance. He simply desires to live worthy, to life a life that is thankful, of the radical grace he was shown.
I can’t think of another story that better encapsulates what Jesus has done for us. We were dead in our sin. Then God made us alive.
WHO AM I
So, who are you this morning? What are you living for? What are you striving to be? What do you think it will do for you? And how is that striving shaping your life?
‘Everybody has to live for something’, Tim Keller writes. ‘Whatever that something is becomes ‘Lord of your Life’, whether you think of it that way or not. Jesus is the only Lord who, if you receive him, will fulfil you completely, and, if you fail him, will forgive you eternally.’[xi]
Will you, like an orange carrot, allow what God has done for you shape and colour the expression of your life?
Will you allow it to define how you answer the question, ‘Who are you?’
You can answer that in a variety of ways, I know. You could answer with your name, your accomplishments, your nationality etc. And they’re not wrong answers, or evil answers. But they’re not complete answers.
When John writes his gospel, he doesn’t primarily identify himself with any of that. His primary identity is, ‘the one whom Jesus loved.’ (Jn. 13:23; 19:26 ; 20:20)
When Paul talked about himself, he says:
‘My old self has been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.’
The Apostle Paul, Galatians 2:20 (NLT)
[i] Paulo Nutini, Iron Sky, Caustic Love (Atlantic Records, Warner Music UK Limited, 2014)
[ii] Kassia St Clair, The Secret Lives of Colour (John Murray Publishers, An Hachette UK company, 2016), pp. 108-109.
[iii] Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (Free Press, 1973), pp. 3, 7.
[iv] Timothy Keller, engaging with Becker’s work in, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Scepticism (Hodder & Stoughton, An Hachette UK Company, 2008), p. 163.
[v] Ibid III, p. 166.
[vi] Ibid IV, p. 164
[vii] Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening (1849)
[viii] Ibid IV, p. 162
[ix] “Thus when the ambitious man, whose slogan was “Either Caesar or nothing”, does not become Caesar, he is in despair over it. But this signifies something else, namely, that precisely because he did not become Caesar he now cannot bear to be himself. Consequently he is not in despair over the fact that he did not become Caesar, but he is in despair over himself for the fact that he did not become Caesar.”― Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening
[x] Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
[xi] Ibid IV, p. 173
TRISTAN SHERWIN 
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