Keswick at Portstewart - Wednesday Morning 8 July 2026 - Mark Maynell

 

KESWICK AT PORTSTEWART – MORNING BIBLE READING – WEDNESDAY 8 JULY 2026 – MARK MAYNELL

 

Well, we are going to break into Colossians chapter two verse one to verse 7.

 

Now, I wonder if you have heard of Luis Carlos Dorona Cabral de Camara. Correct. You haven't heard of him probably.  I practiced that a couple of times this morning. So, that was the best yet. So, I'm relieved and I'm not going to say it again.  He was a Portuguese aristocrat who died in 2007 at the age of only 40. He was a bachelor with no siblings and at the age of 28 he made his will in front of two registry offices office witnesses in Lisbon to ensure that things would go exactly according to the plans he had set in the event of his death. And he was adamant that his riches would not end up going to the state as apparently that happens automatically in in Portugal if you die in testate without legal heirs. And so Luis Carlos had clearly a very troubled life.  He was the illegitimate son of an aloof mother. He was brought up by a nanny. He inherited a huge estate from his grandmother but had no relatives and very few friends. He largely spent his wealth on motorbikes and wine. He was liked by his neighbours and acquaintances, but he kept himself very much to himself. So when he finalized his will, he asked the lawyers in Lisbon for a phone book. He then literally picked out 70 names at random from the phone book and they were his chosen heirs. Now, when he did die in 2007, these heirs were contacted out of the blue. They had no idea that their names were in this man's will. Initially, I guess many thought it was a scam. I mean, you would, wouldn't you? I mean, it's like getting, you know, an email from a Nigerian prince saying that, you know, I just need £10,000 and then you'll inherit a billion or something. And you think, yeah, right. But actually, no, this was genuine. And each of these 70 families, either the individuals or their descendants, gained nearly €3,000. As one of his neighbours said when the news came out, and actually this news did go viral around the world, one of the neighbours said, "I'm sure that he just wanted to create confusion by leaving his belongings to strangers. It would have amused him." I mean, after all, you can't take it with you, can you? And the first that each of these 70 heard that they were the inheritors was when lawyers made contact out of the blue. Before that moment, they've been oblivious. Even though their names were recorded in a legal docent, it had been kept hidden for whatever it was 12 years or so. 

Now, we are more like that 70 than we might care to realize. We are inheritors and we have been even from the point when we were blissfully unaware of it. So let's just think about how that might be. The first point I want to make is is what I've called the revelation of the gospel. Now Paul understood this very clearly.  speaking of this Christian gospel, he says back in chapter 1 verse 5, I've become its servant by the commission God gave me to present to you the word of God in its fullness. The mystery that's been kept hidden for ages and generations, but is now disclosed to the Lord's people. A great mystery. Now, he's not talking about some sort of detective who done it that you buy at the station or whatever, you know, when we discover the killer on the last page. No, this is not some spooky kind of ghost story or a story of the unexplained or an P D James story or whatever it might be. No, a biblical mystery is nothing like that. It's actually more of a technical term. It’s for something that was secret that is now revealed. It now gets made known. So what is it? Drum roll, please. And then there's a trumpet fanfare. 

Verse 27, here it is. “To them, God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you the hope of glory.” What people hadn't grasped before was Jesus, the Jewish king, the Messiah, the anointed one, the one who is the Lord of his people, will be recognized by the entire world as their rightful king. He has claims over everybody. The Lord's people, the Jews, received this shocking news. And at first, many of them struggled to come to terms with that. Even some of the apostles and disciples struggled to come to terms with that. I mean, I thought this was just for us. I mean, you know, the language, the prophecies, the culture, the role that he's stepping into is very much ours. But we're now told this is for everybody whether you recognize him or not. Now of course people in the world around the world they weren't expecting anybody to come along and say “oh actually by the way I'm your king. Most of us, you know, we might have our own political systems and our own cultures and countries and so on and that's all well and good, but to be told actually you got a king over all of that.” And even in those places that are monarchies, you got a king over your king because he's the king of kings, the president of presidents. And of course, not everybody is that pleased about it. And it's been like that since the beginning, since this king was an infant. When a particular king is suddenly told there's a king to be born, it's not surprising he doesn't feel that good about it. And of course, it's not like some lawyer getting in touch  and just saying, "Oh, by the way, you've been given €3,000." But Paul's job is to get the word out to say you are due for some inheritance. something really quite mind-boggling. Whether you're Jewish or not, but there's a king. He's your king. And you must acknowledge that. Otherwise, you don't get anything. That's what drives Paul on, isn't it? It's what he himself has come to know. And for Paul, the most Jewish of Jews, as he writes to the Philippians, the one who, you know, prides himself on all his heritage and his family tree and his education, you know, he was the Jew of the Jews. It's fascinating, isn't it? That the Lord chooses him to be the one to take it to those who before he considered utterly unclean, revolting, and completely to be avoided. It's interesting that the Lord did that, don't you think? And in fact, it is this job that Paul devotes his entire life to making sure that Jews and then for the Greeks, for the Gentiles, wherever he goes, hear about their king. But when you begin to unpack, as we have already done actually this week, we begin to unpack what this Jewish Messiah entails and who he is and what he's done, you can begin to see why he's so energized and motivated. It's not hard once you begin to grasp it. But I think verse 27 of chapter 1 gives us one of the most succinct and distilled expressions of what being a Christian believer is like in the entire Bible. It takes only seven words.

It's only seven words in Greek. It's only seven words in English. Christ in you, the hope of glory. Just seven words that can contain multitudes. “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Isn't that brilliant? Let those words echo around your mind and heart and memory. It's not difficult to memorize. Christ in you, the hope of glory. Christ in me. Christ in us, the hope of glory. Now, not only does that work as a superb distillation of our experience, it also actually gives me a perfect structure of my talk. So, that made me happy.  And we see being modelled in Paul's ministry what it is to live this out for the Colossians to imitate to understand what it means to have Christ in me and what it means to have this hope of glory. So let's think first about what it means for Paul the Apostle. We'll touch briefly on what it means for the Colossians and then we will pick up and run with that and focus entirely on that tomorrow. But what does it mean for the apostle? A life motivated by, focused on, completed by the gospel. Remember back to the Damascus road, an event that was just so formative, fundamental for Paul and indeed actually for the New Testament church. I mean, it's fascinating, isn't it? I mean, the book of Acts is kind of misnamed, isn't it? It's not the Acts of the Apostles. It's the Acts of well, maybe two and a half apostles. That's not such a good title, probably.  But actually what is even odder is that Peter is the focus and then after Paul is converted he becomes the primary focus and think of you know the hundreds of stories and amazing things that each of the apostles and others are doing as the gospel you know the pebble is dropped in the pond in Jerusalem and then it ripples out to Jude to Samaria to the ends of the earth and in every direction things are happening the world is being transformed. Think of all the stories Luke could have contained in his book, but he focuses on just a few. In a way, that's a bit frustrating. I guess we'll have eternity to find out the rest. But we get Paul's conversion in detail three times in the book of Acts. Have you realized that? The whole story, it's clearly that significant and important. And you remember what happens? What Jesus says to the one who had been persecuted him. Acts 22 is one example. Verse 15, you will be his witness to all people. All people, not just the people of Israel. You will be my witness to all people of what you've seen and heard. So, what does that entail? Well, back to Colossians 1 and verse 8, “He the Lord Jesus is the one we proclaim, admonishing and teaching everyone with all wisdom so that we may present everyone fully mature in Christ. To this end, I strenuously contend with all the energy Christ so powerfully works in me.” In a way, he he's doing what those Portuguese lawyers had to do, tell unsuspecting beneficiaries that they had the right to an inheritance. They had no idea. But there the similarity stopped because of course these inheritors, these recipients are not chosen at random in a phone book. And the inheritance is not some sort of measly financial sum. I mean, if you want to give me €3,000, I would be delighted. Just putting that on record. But that's measily compared to the greatest gift human history has ever known. A gift that lasts for eternity and is offered to every creature on earth. Why? Because this gift is not an idea, is not a way of life, is not a concept, let alone a philosophy. This gift is a person. He's the one we proclaim. Now, sure, there are things to know about him, just as there are always things to know about your spouse. There are statements that are verifiably true or false. There are perceptions. There are assumptions which may or may not resonate with your spouse's own perceptions. But in the end, that's not the point. It's not enough just to know things about It's another thing to know them. It's not news about the king that Paul introduces people to. Paul introduces them to the king himself. It's like there's someone rather special I'd like you to meet. He really is the point of it all.  the beginning and the end. And it's hard to improve from on these lines from Max Lucado. Let me just quote. He said, "If our greatest need had been information, God would have sent us an educator. If our greatest need had been technology, God would have sent us a scientist. If our greatest need had been money, he would have sent us an economist. Heaven help us." If our greatest need had been pleasure, God would have sent us an entertainer, but our greatest need was forgiveness. So God sent us a Saviour.” The ultimate benchmark for Christian preaching, for all Christian ministry, is Jesus. Does it point to him? It might be indirect. It might be oblique. But in the end, does it point to him? If not, then it's not Christian. End of. It really is as basic as that. And that is why Paul just slogs at it. So you know the first illustration of this, the first sort of manifestation of this is we see this in his priorities, his unshakable priorities. He proclaims that's the announcement, but he doesn't just leave it there. He’s not, you know, the human equivalent of a billboard. He's engaged. He's involved with the people he meets and mingles with. He recognizes that this makes different demands on him. People respond differently and so there's not one size fits-all.  I think that was mentioned in the notice yesterday about the Slavic gospel work that basically people have different needs and different issues and so ministry must take that into account and I think that's the kind of thing that Paul is talking about here and that's implied by admonishing and teaching everybody which is shorthand I guess for the various things required of a pastor teacher Here it does not mean he divides the world into two groups. Those who need rebuking and those who need encouraging. Although sometimes it feels a bit like that. There are all kinds of different aspects to this. There is encouraging. There's explanation. There's reasoning. There's argument. There's appealing. There's pleading. That's just for starters. A task that requires great wisdom and sensitivity. A willingness not to presume what people are thinking or come where they're coming from, but to listen with great wisdom and patience. But you see that there's more to it even than that because for all the differences that the various people we encounter in life may show for anyone this is a job that's beyond us. It's impossible. We cannot do it. think of this. So Paul walks into a city with just a handful of friends of teammates into central Anatolia which is that sort of huge land mass that we now know as Turkey or Turka despite from being from Tarsus which is sort of on the south Mediterranean coast. Many places around Anatolia would have been new to him and he would have had to learn and understand something of what it meant to live in this place and that place and this county or whatever it is. But that doesn't stop him but as we read from Acts chapter nine onwards you get a sense of the variety that he encounters and in some places people are absolutely overjoyed to find that they've got a king they can trust at last in contrast to all the rulers and emperors and provincial governors and warlords and all the rest of it. At last a leader we can truly trust. But in other towns, Paul has to leave under cover of darkness. His life literally in danger. And in fact, in some places, he is stoned to within inches of his life. People knew what death looked like. And people then sometimes after stoning Paul, they thought they'd finished. Maybe it's because I watch too many sort of detective shows and so on, but I do sometimes wonder if anyone did an autopsy on Paul's body after his death without knowing anything about him. This is a bit gruesome. I know it's early in the morning, but just bear with me.  if they did an autopsy on his body, what would it reveal? Just think of the scars, the fractures, let alone just the wear and tear of an extraordinarily difficult life. Quite apart from the three shipwrecks, I don't know how that might manifest itself on him, but you without knowing anything about him, a pathologist would have a field day as to the kind of life this person has led. But he's driven because he wants to introduce people to their king. It's incredibly tough. So, how on earth does he keep going? Well, verse 9, he tells us, "It's not me." I mean, the fact that I'm still at it, the fact that I'm still writing this letter to you, Colossians, is testimony to the fact that, well, as he says, it's all the energy that Christ so powerfully works in me. But you see, that's precisely what Christ promised would happen at Pentecost. God's power comes down on his people to bear witness to his name. And if you want evidence of this in Paul's life, just look on pretty much every page of Acts from chapter nine more or less onwards. I mean, I just thinking of, you know, I mean, I have not been stoned. I'm relieved to hear and I hope that no one is. It's not something that, you know, we don't want to have some kind of sort of martyr mentality, but if I was Paul and I'd just been stoned, I think I'd want a sabbatical after that, don't you? I think I'd at least allow myself a bit of a holiday, don't you? But, you know, I'm clearly far too soft. What does he do? Goes to the next town and risks exactly the same thing happening. And no doubt, word gets around. I mean, you know, in the age before modern communications, people still communicated and word spread. I'm sure there were people going around on the trade routes and saying, "Hey, watch out for this weird guy, Paul. You'll recognize him because he's covered in bandages and stoning markings." He gets up and does the same again. This is weird. This is supernatural. No, I don't think this is necessarily something everybody's expected to do. I think there was something fairly unique about Paul. But, you know, there are stories occasionally of people who just do the most extraordinary, even reckless things. Perhaps there's even something a bit reckless and unhealthy even about how Paul does it. I don't know. I don't want to get into that and we're all different and we all have different capacities. But Paul in quite a remarkable way is testimony in his own body and life to this idea that Christ is in us. Christ is in him, the hope of glory. Christ in you, the hope of glory. Paul's natural drivenness and ambition and I've no doubt that he was a very ambitious man and in its sort of ungodly pre conversion form it was brutally ugly. It was kind of psychopathic really. He wanted people dead. And God seems to take some of those attributes and transforms them not for Paul's own agenda, but for God's kingdom. I think that's why, you know, Paul has ambitions, you can see this in Romans, of wanting to take the gospel to Spain. And who knows, maybe even to the British Isles, if he'd lived long enough, it's entirely possible he wanted to get the gospel everywhere. Christ in you. I think this shows Paul himself is becoming more and more like his Lord. Paul is taking up his cross. But to what end? To what end? End of verse 8 “that we may present everyone fully mature in Christ.” You could translate it complete for the job to be finished for someone who is everything God intended them to be. What we were made to be and what we're saved to be. The job is done. And so that's his unwavering gold. He's on one track minded on that.

A few years ago, I was chatting to old friends who live in a country that I often go to for work and they've been committed to serving a small body of believers from the country of Turkmenistan. They first lived in Turkmenistan but were thrown out and for decades they've been living in an adjacent country and their job has been to translate the Bible into Turkman. and it's been a massive project as I'm sure you can appreciate. They got into doing this translation work because they both, studied Russian at university and that was sort of the way into serving the gospel in Central Asia. And one of the real challenges and was incredibly discouraging. I remember we were texting soon after they discovered this that there had been a New Testament, not an Old Testament done yet, but there had been a New Testament or much of the New Testament rather in Turkman. And the more they worked with it, the more they realized it really wasn't very good. And in fact, it was better for them just to junk it and start completely again from scratch which was easier than trying to sort of play around with what was there. But after I think it was something like 9 years, the project was done. The first time in history the Bible in the language of Turkman and they gone through all the necessary checks and proofreading and trials in with the few Turkman believers there are not that many but trying them in Bible studies and with preaching and all the rest just seeing how it goes and feedback and so on it's a very laborious process but just a few years ago finally the digital version was released online and then it went into physical print at some presses in Moscow and then distributed. But it's illegal in Turkmenistan itself. And so the best way to distribute it was on thumb drives and on the old dumb phones. You they had a version of it you could put on a dumb phone rather than a smartphone that was very hard to detect. And that's how it began to be spread around. A remarkable thing. It's absolutely thrilling. And it was, you know, I had absolutely nothing to do with it, but it was just amazing and inspiring just to sort of be alongside these friends that they've been slogging away for so long in very sort of laborious, often really boring, invisible work. And then finally to be able to say, "We've done it." And it occurred to me at the time, and we were chatting about this afterwards, that this is probably one of, if not the only type of Christian ministry where you can say, "It's finished." You can actually say, "Yeah, there's nothing more we can do with this. It's done." Maybe in 29 years there'll be a revision. You know, that happens. Every generation or so does things, but it is finished. The work actually is finished. And now what they've been doing for the last 10 years or so is producing all kinds of materials, study guides, all kinds of things. You know, you name it, it's needed. And it's just amazing how they're able to build on what they've already done. But that is pretty much the only type of ministry where you get to see the whole thing in every other way. And it doesn't matter whether you are someone who is a leader from the front or someone you wouldn't say boo to a goose from a stage but you're quietly getting along with people just alongside in a coffee shop or whatever. We sow a seed here. We have a word there. We help out at a meeting wherever. We assume it's part of a bigger thing, but we just don't get to see it. It's very rare that we see the whole thing. We want our friends to know the Lord. There were a couple of guys I was at university with. I was a baby Christian when I first went to university. I was converted in the February of my A level year and there were a couple of guys in the Christian Union in my year who were mature. They were enthusiastic and I learned huge amounts from them especially actually looking back because they were different from me from very different backgrounds.  But they were enthusiastic and yet one of the hardest things, it was just at the beginning of my fourth year. Both of them had fallen away and we're now 35 years on. As far as I know, neither of them have come back to the Lord. It was devastating at the time. It was the first time it had happened to somebody I knew.  To have them both at the same time was quite shocking. And the thing is, one of the things I had to learn at the time, and I still hold on to this, is that I don't know the end of the story. I don't know the end of the story. And when I remember, I still pray for them. Now, this is pure speculation. I have no idea, but I just have a hunch. And my perception at the time was one of them was doing it with a high hand, and it was just like a huge relief to them. But the other, it was almost as if that after that point, he laughed but never smiled again. Now, that's an exaggeration and it's, you know, not strictly true, but the point is I always had a sense that this second guy called Matt just always knew what he was turning his back on. I don't know the end of the story. I'm sure we've got all kinds of instances and  friends like that. But you see, it's interesting, isn't it? Paul is committed to the long term to the full story to presenting somebody complete in Jesus even after he's moved on to the next place even after he's shuffled off this mortal coil he knows that actually we do our bit and pray for the end of the story because in the end it was never about him and it was never about me or you in the first place. It's all Christ's power that works powerfully in his people. Because you see, the ultimate proof of the pudding is not cards filled in at a meeting, not even going to church for 5 years or 30 years, not even being on the church council or an elder or even being in the pulpit regularly. The proof of the pudding is on the last day, fully mature, the story finished. And because that is way beyond anything I can imagine, it reminds me that it's not up to me in the first place. And so Paul, both in terms of his own walk and in terms of what keeps him going in ministry, holds on to those seven words. I do this because Christ is in me. And I keep going because I have the hope of glory. But I do this because I want Christ in you. And I keep going with you. Even though I might now have moved a thousand miles away. Even though I know my time on earth will some soon be done, I do this that you might have the hope of glory and so that when we say goodbye, we're actually saying see you then. It gives us encouragement in the face of real discouragements because the Christian life is full of them. It's particularly painful when actually some of the discouragements hit headlines as I know that they have in this part of the world in recent months as I know they have in the last 5 years with people who led me to Christ who discipled me one of whom should be in prison but isn't. But in the end, it's not about them. It's not about you. It's not about me. It's about Christ in you, the hope of glory. So that's what drives Paul on. How does that sort of work out in the Colossians lives? You know, it's a bit like needing bread has to be needed into their lives. Well, Paul is straightforward. The acid test is very clear, very simple, and completely logical. Verse six. “So then, just as you receive Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and build up in him., strengthening the faith as you were taught, overflowing with thankfulness. Do you see how this precisely mirrors what Paul has said for himself? And that's why Paul mixes his metaphors. I was taught at school, never mix your metaphors. It never stops the Bible writers because they do this with abandon all over the shop. Jesus does that. So basically suddenly we're mixing the metaphor of a tree and a building. We can do that now. We have apostolic authority to mix metaphors. So go and mix your metaphors with abandon. Anyway, that's not the point. What do we know about this town of Colosse? Well, over the last years or so, Turkey has been a country I've done more work in than any other. It's a country I've grown to love deeply, and my last visit was there just in April, which was my 22nd visit to the country. And I love that going there, not least because my background was in classics. So, I love the fact that it's full of all kinds of classical relics and history, but actually mainly because of the burgeoning Turkish church. so, in the 1970s, it's thought that there were literally only 10 Turkish ethnic Turkish believers. There were other believers in Turkey, but ethnic Turks. And I remember the first time I first few times I was going to Turkey, it was very discouraging because you think all these places are in the book of Acts. Paul, you know, if he was alive today would be a Turk and it's just like all these places have lost their Christian heritage. And yes, but it's not quite like that because the Turks came from the Asian steps around 1066. or thereabouts. Around the time of the Norman conquest of England, the Turks moved westwards with Islam. So the Turks have never had the gospel. There has never been an ethnic Turkish church and they pushed people west and to begin with there was some executions of people who wouldn't bow the knee to Islam.  but what is fascinating is that the Ottoman Empire was far more enlightened in many ways than Europe was when it came to other religions. And so Jews and Christians were allowed not just to exist but even to thrive in the Ottoman Empire. And so in every town there would be many churches and synagogues. And so when in the 1970s one or two started being converted, I've met two brothers who remember being two of that original 10. And now there are about 10,000. Now think about that. That's astonishing growth in 50 years from 10 to 10,000. I can't do maths or stats. I think lines go like that or something. It's up and they're some of the most inspiring brothers and sisters I know. I just love just being with them. Anyway, I was there a few years ago and some friends of ours drove up to the Lus Valley from Antalya on the south coast where there's there are there's a guy who's planted four churches in the last 10 years in Antalya. But we drove up north about three hours drive to the Lus Valley and there’s a triangular valley where the river Lus goes through the middle and you'll find Colosse, Hierapolis Laodicea and if you stand where Colosse was, you can see the other two. They're just a few miles further up the valley. So they could the three cities could see each other and they were very close. That's explains why you see in Colossians there's communication between the three and each of these cities was bustling was lively and they you know they were like sort of triplets almost and at the end of chapter 4 we read that the Colossians great friend Aristarchus become the great sort of envoy from here actually had relations with Laodicea and Hierapolos as well. But you go to Colosse today and there's nothing there because the city and indeed the whole region kept on having earthquakes and Colosse's never been excavated. The other two have and you can go and visit them and they're spectacular. One day I hope Colosse will be excavated. But in earthquakes buildings crumble and trees fall over unless they have strong deep roots and buildings are well constructed. Oh, do you see now why Paul might just use those mixed metaphors? Be a tree with deep roots. Roots that are kind of the mirror like on your handbooks of the branches above ground. Build up carefully and slowly to make the building sturdy and strong. And the way to do that it's very very clear. Verse six and seven. Stick with where you started. I mean, if you're building a building, you build your foundations. But if the subsequent floors are slightly off, it's not strong and it'll wobble and when there's an earthquake, it'll be a jelly and just collapse. A tree without roots will just be blown away, let alone blown over. And Paul's point is, stick with Jesus. The Jesus you were taught. The Jesus of the scriptures. The Jesus who is revealed. The Jesus who was a mystery to the Gentile world but has now been revealed. The King of Kings. Stick with him because he's the only king in town. It's a tough call. Especially in a culture in a world that has grown up has done away with such phases. You know some of my family thought when I got religion at university it will be a phase. Stick with him. Christ in you the hope of glory. Christ in you, the hope of glory. Christ in you, in us, our hope of glory. Those roots and that construction are unbreakable.