8.12.2026
When it comes to the Bible, Colossians is one of those books that once I’ve finished reading it, I want to turn right around and read it again! It’s hard for me to turn loose of something that hasn’t turned loose of me! I’ve enjoyed preaching through it this summer, and I’m sad that after this Sunday, I’ll be done. I hope you feel the same.
I’m sure it’s no shock to anyone when I write that I was pretty nerdy as a high schooler. . . or, at least, I was nerdy about some things. Math equations would make me panic, but a book report or an essay . . . piece of cake! In fact, I enjoyed it (which is good, because that’s basically what I do here every week)!
One of my favorite books from high school is one I’m currently rereading (I’ve already finished my book for our reading group,) the Charles Dickens classic, David Copperfield. That was one of those books that as soon as I finished it, I wanted to start it over again.
But there’s an unpleasant memory attached to the book that I can’t shake some 49 years later.
As you know, my school was a very strict religious school. It was so strict that some well-intentioned librarian went through every library book and blacked out anything that even faintly resembled a swear word (and you’d be surprised by what they considered swearing). Of course, we took pleasure mentally filling in the blanks! And what we came up with was pretty creative . . . but I digress.
My buddy, Jack, and I were checking out our books. Mine was David Copperfield and his was The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (I forget what play he was reading, but I know what it wasn’t). I checked mine out and waited as Jack handed his book to the librarian. She stamped it, handed it to him and then said, “Wait a minute.” She took it back and proceeded (and I am not making this up) to open it up to Othello and RIPPED the entire play out of the book!
“No one needs to read that trash,” she said as she handed Jack the now IN-complete Works of William Shakespeare.
Jack and I were both stunned. I still am. Whenever we get together, that story comes up. Thankfully, it didn’t affect my attitude toward David Copperfield (Shakespeare, either)!
One thing we learned from Colossians is the impossibility of changing people from the outside in. If you remember, Paul wondered why members of the little church, who belonged to Christ, were now listening to man-made rules like “Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch.” Commands like that were worthless, Paul wrote, “All these regulations refer to things that perish with use; they are simply human commands and teachings. These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-imposed piety, humility, and severe treatment of the body, but they are of no value in checking self-indulgence.”
You can make “sin” illegal (think Prohibition in the 1920s); you can mark naughty words out of library books; you can outright ban library books, but that’s not going to change people. Like I said, we found all sorts of interesting and creative words to fill in those blanks . . . and we were (mostly) good kids! People are going to be people and forcing them to change is not going to take care of the real need — a change of heart, or as Paul puts it, “being buried with Christ,” and “putting off the old self.”
Those kinds of changes have to come from the inside.
I don’t know what she thought she was accomplishing when she ripped the play out. It wasn’t like we couldn’t have checked it out of the public library or just bought it down at Andan’s Book Land.
One of the reasons she disapproved of Othello was because it involved an interracial marriage. That Othello, a North African, was a baptized Christian made no difference. It was the color of his skin.
This is still remarkable to me. I cannot understand why anyone would consider someone inferior in any way due to an accident of birth! And this is double true of believers! But I remember hearing the resentment from older generation church-goers over forced integration.
Truth is, it was forced because the church failed to be faithful.
I don’t know how one can read Romans, Galatians, II Corinthians, Ephesians, Philippians, or Colossians and fail to see that Christ died to reconcile us to God AND to one another. The physical and social and political and whatever else kind of categories that people get so rotten hung up over are torn down in Christ. Paul wrote in Colossians 3:11, “. . . there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!” There is no longer!
But Christians get wrapped up in controlling people’s outward actions and judging people's outward appearances, when what matters comes from the inside.
Christ, we learn from Colossians, is our life – he is “all and in all.” Not part of our life, or just “in” our life, but Christ is our life. And because of that — not because of some morality police — we live differently because we live like Christ, and we look at things (and people) differently because we see them through the eyes of Christ. We are different — not because of outward pressure but inward presence. We live differently and treat people differently because we are “God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved.”
Blessings,
Pastor Terry
PS -Now that we’ve spent the summer in Colossians, I’d encourage you to go back and re-read it. You could easily read it straight through in one sitting, and I mean EASILY. The YouTube recording, read by David Suchet (you might know him as BBC’s excellent Poirot), lasts only 14 minutes. Seriously. Read it through – or listen to it here:
https://youtu.be/k4YnF3KJXRc?si=napyuuVybtllrYQA