C, Post-Pentecost 7 Proper 12 - Colossians 2:6–15, 18–19 Luke 11:13 "Pray for the Holy Spirit"

Colossians 2:6–15, 18–19 (ESV) Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him,  rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.  See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.  For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily,  and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority.  In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ,  having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead.  And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses,  by cancelling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.  He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him.  Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind,  and not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God.

Luke 11:13 (ESV) (Jesus says to his disciples.) If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

Does God punish?  Does he test his people?  What is the reality of God’s discipline, for you and me? 

Christians suffer just as much as the next person does. 

When is our suffering a result of our disobedience, and when does our suffering occur because of following Christ?

Now that Christ has come and died for us, why do we still suffer?  If God is a God of love, why do we encounter evil?

A myriad of questions come to the fore when we examine God’s work of punishment because of sin and evil.

Jesus prays and his disciples ask him to teach them to pray as John the Baptist taught his disciples.  The disciples of Jesus did not fully understand and know that Jesus was the Son of God, but if they had they may have asked Jesus, “If you are the Son of God, why do you pray?”

We know Jesus is the Son of God, we know he was born as the Messiah, the Christ, or the anointed one.  He was born as a human being and anointed to die for our sin, yet he was without sin.  He was the Son of God and the Son of man sent to save humanity from itself.  So why does he pray?

Surely, being the eternal Son of God, he could speak the Word of God with omnipotent power and control whatever or whoever he chose.  But no, so often Jesus is found in a quiet place of prayer. 

Jesus teaches his disciples how to pray by teaching them to pray to their Father.  Just as Jesus prays to his Heavenly Father, he teaches them, and us, to do the same.  He does so for one and the same reason.  Our weakness and the weakness he assumed by being born in the flesh of a human.

At the heart of Jesus’ prayer is a prayer for the Holy Spirit.  This also might seem strange since he is the Son of God and that he has already received the Holy Spirit in his baptism.  But Jesus teaches them what he is doing.  He is praying to his Father in Heaven to continually send the Holy Spirit to him.

In his human weakness he continually bangs on God’s door for help.  Jesus’ help comes in the name of his Lord and God who made heaven and earth, who sends the Holy Spirit.  And so too for us!

“Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him,  rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.  See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.  For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily,  and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority.”  (Colossians 2:6–11 ESV)

We deceive ourselves when we stop praying to God our Father.  We take ourselves out of the cycle of confession and forgiveness when we stop praying.  Like a young child learning to walk we reject help from our Heavenly Father, and soon enough there is a buster and suffering follows.

On the other hand, Jesus still hangs on to the hand of his Father, all the way to the cross.  In doing so, the Holy Spirit guides him in the human weakness he bears.  Although he is not evil, he bears the flesh of Adam, he endures in the evil of human flesh without succumbing to the evil.

Jesus trusts in the overwhelming steadfast love of our Heavenly Father, and, bearing all the suffering that goes with the Son of God giving up his divinity and dwelling in the flesh of his own creation, Jesus teaches us to do the same.

As Paul says to the Colossians,  “Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind,  and not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God.” (Colossians 2:18–19 ESV)

As Christians we get our identity from Jesus Christ.  But when we fail to pray in our weakness for his help, we disqualify ourselves by puffing up our human spirit in favour over the Holy Spirit.  And this is where our suffering can begin.  We let go of God’s hand and take the hand of fellowship with our visions of delusion, reasoning of the human spirit, and our own desires of worship which turn us in on ourselves and results in pain and suffering.

God tests us, and the punishment we receive is not so much what God does to us, but that he withdraws from us and leaves us to our own devices.  “For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives, he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness.” (Hebrews 12:6,10b ESV)

What is happening here, is we as Christians believe in Jesus Christ for our help.  But once that help comes, we mistake the Holy Spirit for our own spirit, and on doing this, lose site of Jesus.  We fall out of the cycle of salvation that God has placed us in at baptism. 

It’s as if having been buried with him in baptism, we stop allowing the Holy Spirit to raise us with Jesus through faith.  The powerful working of God in the Holy Spirit is replaced with death; that death is trusting the human spirit. 

Jesus teaches us to pray, to join in with him, to receive the Holy Spirit, as he received the Holy Spirit, and needed to, while he was incarnate in flesh  and was led to his death and resurrection by the power of the same Holy Spirit.

Although God disciplines us, and we suffer, “Nevertheless, he looks upon our distress, when he hears our cry.  For our sake he remembered his covenant, and relented according to the abundance of his steadfast love.” (adapted from Psalm 106:44–45)

The covenant God sees is his covenant with Jesus Christ.  When God sees you, he sees Jesus.  As God allows us to suffer as a result of our sin, he wills us to see our sin in the suffering of Jesus.  He allows the Holy Spirit to return us back to trust in Jesus Christ, and this gives us peace with him, our Father in heaven.

While Jesus dwelt amongst us in plain sight, he taught us to pray.  Now that he is out of sight, how much more do we need to pray for the Holy Spirit?  We are reassured he is still with us only through faith, given only by the Holy Spirit.

We dwell in times where we need to constantly cry out in prayer to our Father for ourselves, each other and for the society in which we live.  The temptations to worship the self in the desires of one’s pleasure; physically in our achievements, sexually through unauthorised homosexual and heterosexual acts,  emotionally through the instant gratification of what we want to look at and consume, individually as we are led away from fellowship to faith in one’s own will.  When we are overcome in these temptations, they might seem pleasing to the eye but under the surface they ooze with death.

God in his steadfast love and mercy allows markers to appear that certainly do shock us from time to time.  Tsunamis, bushfires, Covid-19, war, or economic collapse may or may not occur as a result of our individual deeds, but they are a call to pray, to pester God as did Abraham when he questioned God about saving Sodom and Gomorrah, and as Jesus encourages us to, in his parable of the imprudent fellow who pesters his neighbour to get bread to feed a guest.

God the Father wants us to bother him in prayer, just as Jesus did.  He wants your trust and your prayers, he wants to help you in your sinfulness, to save you and sustain you.  When you pray to Jesus for the Holy Spirit, the Heavenly Father is pleased to oblige.  Amen.