Driven

Text: Colossians 1:1-14

What drives people? What motivations account for their successes and their failures? Do we know more about people when we know their attainments, or when we know the driving force behind what we see? What drives you and me?

It might be too easy a target, but today let's think about what seems to have driven the people involved in some of the financial collapses on Wall Street. But we'll do so not to single these people out as the most despicable, but as far more like most of us than not. They may have been more successful in manipulating and attaining certain market outcomes, but perhaps no more or less indicative of a world that has lost its story, and therefore its best motivations.

For some reason, we despise greed when it is blatantly displayed; yet the dominant worldview operating in the public square has no resources from which to tell us why. Our secular culture has set matters of truth firmly within the confines of those things which can be enumerated. If something is quantifiable, it is open to true/false categories; if not, it is a matter for personal opinion and nothing more. Financial success is quantifiable; values such as fairness, equity, and justice are not. To say that people want to succeed and are promised continually that it is within their reach is to state the obvious. Many people have despaired of succeeding in such terms; others play the lottery. In reality, when the lights are out and one's own thoughts are the only noise, darkness prevails over mind and spirit.

In the beginning of the epistle before us, Paul sounds a different theme. He writes to those who have hope not of financial success, but of a richness in this world that is funded by confidence in a future beyond it. It is the message of Christ, who holds the real story of our world and our lives, our prospects and our purpose. It's like a turning on of the lights when we've lost everything we need in a dark place, only to find that those things are not unattainable after all. They simply look far different when the light is on.

As we follow Paul through this epistle, let's do so with an awareness that we are usually caught between degrees of darkness and light, too often holding on to the values from which Christ has redeemed us, too seldom walking in the light we know he gives.