Foundations: Encounter God
Join us as we take a closer look at each building block of FHC’s Mission Statement using the book of Colossians as our lens:
“To be a relationally driven community that seeks to encounter God, empower Christ-centred lives, and faithfully serve others"
Scripture: Colossians 2:1-5
Wisdom and Knowledge. For many of us, these are the two key ingredients that define our modern age. In many ways, most of us know more about our world than any of our ancestors ever did. Yet for all that we know and are able to discern from the world around us, we often find the results of our wisdom to be lacking and unfulfilling. In our passage for this week, the Colossian Church faced similar issues as they were being tempted by the wisdom and knowledge of the world around them. Between the Gnostic religions and the philosophies of the Greeks, the marketplace of ideas was booming and pressing in on the church from all sides. For this reason it is important to realize that in Ancient times, when people referred to their “hearts”, as Paul does in verse 2, they were referring to the source of their “thoughts” and way of “thinking”. This is to say that Paul’s purpose in this section isn’t so much to console their troubled hearts as it is to strengthen the foundational beliefs they already knew to be true. The result of which will be a sense of “standing together” and drawing closer to one another in community as they are being “knit together in love”. In N.T. Wright’s book “Broken Signposts”, he writes about the various broken signposts that each of us recognize as foundational values across all cultures throughout history. He categorizes these signposts as Justice, Spirituality, Love, Beauty, Truth, Freedom, and Power. Each of these are valuable in their own right and as a society we’ve done our best to build up structures to uphold them as best we can and yet despite what we “know” about these signposts, it’s clear that we’ve been led astray in almost every which way and have missed the mark on where these signposts have been trying to point us towards all along. To Paul, both wisdom and knowledge by themselves are empty until they find their true meaning in Christ. In the same way, when we consider the various passions and pursuits (signposts) in our own lives, it is important to realize who they are pointing to. Then and only then, can we begin to discover “all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” that were hidden in Christ all along.
Study Questions:
How do you define wisdom and knowledge?
Have you ever needed your “heart” encouraged? What was that experience like?
What “plausible arguments” have you encountered in your faith journey?
Which broken signposts resonate the most with you? Why?
What would it look like for our community to be “knit together in love”?
