When someone tells you something on their heart that was heavier than you imagined, it’s easy to sit in stunned silence. A coworker mentions on the walk out to the parking lot that her marriage has been coming apart for a year. A man you have known for a decade says his son has stopped speaking to him. The conversation you thought you were having is gone, and in its place is a conversation with a person who is suffering. The first thought you might have is that somebody qualified ought to be handling this.

That instinct can come off as humility, but often that instinct isn’t humility. We have taught ourselves to hand off hard cases to specialists. He needs a professional. She should talk to a counselor. That is really a question for the pastor. Some of those referrals are wise, and a person in crisis sometimes needs help a friend is not equipped to give. The instinct to hand off the hard conversation isn’t entirely wrong. However, that instinct can’t survive a sentence Paul writes near the end of Colossians 1, where he describes his own life’s work and uses one word three times in a row.

The Word Paul Says Three Times

“Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ.” (Colossians 1:28)

The repetition of the word everyone is doing work. He warns everyone, teaches everyone, and aims to present everyone. Paul could have said it once and moved on, but instead he stacks the same word into all three slots of a single sentence, which is the sort of thing a writer does when he expects to be argued with.

He had reason to expect it. Paul didn’t plant the church at Colossae and had apparently never visited them—plus he was writing from a prison cell to a congregation he knew mostly by report alone. What he knew was that teachers had arrived peddling an “upgrade.” Christ was fine as a starting point, they suggested, though the serious believer would want the fuller knowledge, the deeper insight, the practices that separated the advanced from the ordinary. Against a false religion of fuller and deeper insight, Paul writes three “everyones” in one line.

However, Paul isn’t just talking about his purpose as an apostle or the pastor’s job description as a minister. Paul is telling the church what the church is for, rather than instructing their minister on his job while the rest of the room happens to listen in.

What Christ Presents and What We Present

The verb Paul chooses in verse 28 is the same one he used a few sentences earlier, and the pairing organizes the whole passage.

“And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him,” (Colossians 1:21–22)

Christ presents. That is the first and governing use of the word, and everything about it is finished. The reconciling happened in a body, by a death, on a particular afternoon, and the three words describing the result leave no room for us to make a contribution to our salvation. A person presented holy and blameless and above reproach has nothing left to prove.

The Colossians were being sold a Christ who needed to be supplemented, which would mean Christ is not sufficient to present us blameless in the presence of God. The sufficiency of Christ to make holy and present us as holy supplies the hinge of Paul’s entire argument.

“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible… And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” (Colossians 1:15–17)

“For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.” (Colossians 1:19–20)

The One who made everything and holds everything together is the same One who was killed on a Roman cross so that the hostility could end. He left heaven and became a man without ceasing to be God, lived the life we have failed to live, died under the wrath our sins earned, and rose on the third day. Paul calls this the mystery now disclosed, and he sums it in four words that he seems unable to get over: “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27).

With the two uses of the verb side by side, the shape of Christian ministry comes clear. Christ presents us holy. At the same time, we present one another mature, and that presenting is downstream of His, derivative of His, and impossible without it. What a believer does for another believer is help him grow up into what the cross already secured.

A Maturity You Can Recognize

Maturity is the sort of word that dissolves when you press on it, so it helps that Paul defines it elsewhere in concrete terms.

“until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes.” (Ephesians 4:13–14)

The first mark is stability under doctrinal weather. A child believes the last confident adult who spoke, and an infant is fed rather than feeding himself. For a child or baby, that’s fine. However, both are a problem for someone who has been a Christian for eleven years. Someone forwards you a thirty-second clip of a man with good hair saying something warm about God that turns out, when you slow down and check it, to be roughly four degrees off. A mature believer can tell the difference between what is true and what is merely going around, and that ability must be nurtured by handling the text often enough to know the difference by feel.

The second mark faces outward.

“Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ,” (Ephesians 4:15)

Truth spoken in love requires community. A believer can accumulate knowledge alone, but nobody grows into the kind of love Paul describes without others to love by speaking truth. Paul says as much a few verses later when he grounds forgiveness between Christians in the forgiveness God extended in Christ (Ephesians 4:32), and again when he describes a life walked in the Spirit and expressed in worship offered together (Ephesians 5:18–19).

Salvation is a beginning. A believer who looks the same at fifty as at twenty has not stayed faithful to an original deposit, since the deposit of the gospel was meant to grow the believer. This is the target Paul is aiming at when he says he wants to present everyone mature. He is trying to produce adults, and mere attendance makes a poor proxy for that, since a congregation can show up consistently and still be highly immature.

Warning and Teaching Both Require a Room

Part of growing believers into maturity means warning and teaching. Most of us have a strong preference between those two activities.

Warning is the unwelcome half. No one enjoys delivering it, and no one enjoys receiving it, and anyone who has raised a child knows both facts intimately, since the warning that keeps a toddler out of the road is the least pleasant sentence of the afternoon while being the most necessary one. Warning a fellow believer runs on the same logic. You say the difficult thing because you can see where the road goes and because you are willing to risk the relationship to keep him out of it. A friend who will only ever affirm you is not being kind to you; he is protecting his own comfort at your expense.

Teaching is the half we prefer. It’s the positive work of putting truth in front of someone: here is what God has said, here is what it means, here is how a person actually lives in light of it.

To do either activity, you must have Christian relationships. You cannot warn a stranger, because a warning from someone who has no standing in your life registers as an insult. You cannot teach at a distance either, since teaching requires knowing what the person already believes and where they are stuck. Both require presence, conversation, repetition, and the kind of access to another person that only comes from time. There is a real difference between the neighbor you wave to from the driveway and the neighbor whose kitchen you’ve been in countless times. Almost everything Paul describes here can only happen in the second kind of relationship. Our habits of life have thinned that kind of contact, and it removes the conditions we need to obey Paul’s command.

Paul adds a qualifier to the teaching: it is done with all wisdom. He had already prayed for these people along the same line.

“asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God;” (Colossians 1:9–10)

Wisdom, in that prayer, is knowledge that has reached down to real life. Teaching with wisdom means the truth arrives in a form the hearer can act on, which puts a real demand on the teacher. Anyone who has tried to explain the atonement to a seven-year-old has discovered how much vocabulary he has been hiding behind, because a child won’t accept “propitiation” as a satisfactory explanation. That child will want a better explanation. Adults, on the other hand, are more polite about it, not demanding an explanation, but often not understanding either.

The source of that wisdom is the same Christ who is the message, which means the whole enterprise loops back on itself, since we proclaim Him and can do it wisely only insofar as we know Him. No technique can become a substitute for intimate knowledge of Christ, and no amount of communication skill will make up for spending time with Him.

The Right Answer Is That You Cannot

Having set the standard, Paul says what it costs him.

“For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.” (Colossians 1:29)

Toil is the word for labor that leaves you emptied, and the term behind “struggling” comes from the athletic contest, where a man competes to the end of his strength and past it. However, that sort of intensity shouldn’t be filed under the category of athletic competition and rarely associated with our own walk with the Lord.

The most natural reaction to Paul’s sentence is a wince. Reading a description of ministry this demanding and concluding “I can’t do that” feels like a failure, but it’s actually the correct answer, arrived at one clause too early. Paul finishes the thought by naming whose strength he was operating on, and it wasn’t his own. He toiled with His energy, powerfully at work within him. The inability is the premise of the verse rather than an objection to it. We can’t present one another mature apart from the energy of Christ at work in us.

G.Campbell Morgan, who filled a London pulpit for years and was constantly told how brilliant he was. He reportedly hated hearing that compliment, because it implied that what he did couldn’t be imitated. The people who called him brilliant had not seen him at five in the morning with the text open. Their compliment explained the distance between his life and theirs in a way that excused them from not engaging in the ministry of helping others grow into maturity.

We use the same trick with different vocabulary. He is gifted with people. She has a real heart for that. They were raised in a strong home. Each of those may be true, but each can also function as a reason to excuse yourself. Paul closes that exit by locating the power somewhere other than natural temperament. The energy is Christ’s, given to the ordinary believer who has been made new, and it is available even to someone with no training and a full calendar.

Two things in this world are going to outlast you. One of them is the word of God. The other is people. Everything else you are pouring effort into, including the work you are measured by and the projects that will carry your name for a while, has an expiration date that is closer than it looks. The Wright brothers got flight, which is about as durable a legacy as a human being can manufacture, and even that will burn. A person you helped grow up into Christ won’t.

William Carey, who left England for India and spent forty years there without ever coming home, is remembered for a single line: expect great things from God, attempt great things for God. The first half is easy to get behind, since we are all prepared to expect from God. The second half is where most of us stall, because attempting requires choosing a person and a time and doing something about it, and opportunities of this kind are almost always challenging

Choose a person to invest in. It might be the young couple three doors down who have no idea how to lead their children and would say yes to dinner on a Thursday. It might be the kid at work whose father is not in the picture. It might be the woman in her eighties who cannot rake her own yard and has more to teach you about prayer than anyone you know. Look hard at Christ in the morning, open the book before the house wakes up, and then get in the car. The strength for ministry doesn’t come from you, which is the only reason any of this is possible. The One who supplies strength has already promised to present you holy and blameless and above reproach, so get out there and help others mature as well.