Flourishing and the Gospel

Scripture — Colossians 1:3-6 (NRSV)

In our prayers for you we always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, for we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. You have heard of this hope before in the word of the truth, the gospel that has come to you. Just as it is bearing fruit and growing in the whole world, so it has been bearing fruit among yourselves from the day you heard it and truly comprehended the grace of God.

Devotion

When we talk about flourishing, of which fruitfulness is crucial, we generally speak of it as something people do. You flourish. I flourish. We flourish together. Even if flourishing is something we share as a community, which I discussed in yesterday’s devotion, it is still something that human beings do.

We find a different and curious use of the language of fruitfulness in the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Colossians. Paul opens his letter, as usual, by sharing with the recipients his gratitude for them. He is grateful because of their “faith in Christ Jesus and the love that [they] have for all the saints, because of the hope laid up for [them] in heaven” (1:4-5). Faith, hope, and love. Hmmm. That sounds familiar. (See 1 Cor 13:13, for example.)

The Colossian believers first heard about the hope they have in Christ in what Paul calls “the word of the truth, the gospel that has come to [them]” (1:5-6). In the case of the Colossian church, Paul was not the one who first shared this good news with them. Rather, they learned about God’s grace in Christ through “Epaphras, our beloved fellow servant” (1:7).

We would typically speak of what happened to the Colossian Christians in terms of their hearing, believing, and then living the gospel. We might even say that they are flourishing in life because they accepted the good news of salvation through Christ. But Paul uses the language of fruitfulness in a different way in these verses. He writes,

You have heard of this hope before in the word of the truth, the gospel that has come to you. Just as it is bearing fruit and growing in the whole world, so it has been bearing fruit among yourselves from the day you heard it and truly comprehended the grace of God (1:5-6).

In this case, Paul does not say that the Colossians are flourishing or bearing fruit. Rather, it is the gospel that is flourishing, “bearing fruit and growing in the whole world” and in the Colossian church.

What does it mean for the gospel to “bear fruit”? Most obviously, the good news of God’s grace bears fruit when people receive it in faith. This fuels the growth of the church, which Paul describes in Colossians as the growth of the gospel. When the good news grows, the church grows. When the church grows, it’s because the good news is growing.

The flourishing of the gospel includes more than church growth, however. We’ll learn more about this in next Monday’s devotion. But before I finish today, I want to underscore the centrality of the gospel to the flourishing of God’s people, including you and me. As Paul explains, the gospel is bearing fruit among the Colossians “from the day you heard it and truly comprehended the grace of God” (1:6). In this case, we are not the fruit-bearers so much as the fruit, the fruit of the gospel. We become this kind of fruit through hearing and “truly comprehending” the good news of what God has done in Jesus Christ.

Sometimes we lose touch with the utter centrality and importance of the gospel for the Christian life. The good news can feel like the door through which we enter the Christian life, rather than its foundation. The gospel can seem like something from which we move on, rather than that in which we grow deeper as it motivates and energizes our life in Christ. When we move beyond the gospel, we can easily see our performance for God as that which matters most. We can begin to assume that we must earn God’s grace by our good behavior. Now, as we’ll see next week, what we do in response to the gospel matters a great deal. But our efforts should always be a response to God’s primary effort in Christ.

If you want to flourish in life, let the good news of God’s grace in Christ be the center, foundation, and motivation of all that you do. Our fruitfulness is a result of the gospel living in us, shaping our thinking, feeling, and acting. When we bear fruit, God is glorified, to be sure (John 15:8). But the source of our fruitfulness isn’t our brilliance, cleverness, hard work, or even faithfulness. Rather, we are fruitful when God’s grace in Christ transforms us from the inside out.

Find all Life for Leaders devotions here. Explore what the Bible has to say about work at the unique website of our partners, the Theology of Work Project. Reflection on today’s Life for Leaders theme can be found here: God Worked in Creation, Making Humans Workers in His Image (Colossians 1:1–14).