Walk This Way

Sermon Transcript

It’s the time of year that plants are starting to sprout, and anyone who has ever tried gardening knows that it requires patience. You get your soil, you buy your seeds, you create a spot for the seed, you drop the seeds in, you cover them with soil, and then you come back the next day to find…nothing. Here you thought you were getting cucumbers, tomatoes, or kale, and all you see is soil. Eventually a sprout pops up, but even then, you have to keep waiting for the vegetables you hope to eat. Imagine instead of waiting patiently, though, that every day you planted a seed and didn’t see a fully developed plant by the next day, you plucked the seed out of the soil and planted it in different soil. What would happen? You’d never get food out of it.

 

We’re continuing our series this morning in the book of the Bible called Colossians, a letter written to Christians in Colossae, an ancient city of the Roman Empire. The Colossians had become Christians through the ministry of a man named Epaphras, who taught them gospel. Chapter 1 told us that they heard it, understood it, learned it, and ultimately believed it. At that time, it is like their roots were planted into Jesus Christ. But how should they then live going forward? Perhaps you’ve wondered something similar: You’re confident that you’ve believed in Christ, you’ve been baptized, you’ve joined a church; now what? What about when you begin to feel like maybe not much is happening in your life spiritually, and there are other messages you’re hearing that seem to offer a deeper spiritual experience or greater fulfillment? In this passage we are going to see that you should Continue with Christ as you began with Christ. We’ll see what that looks like, what to look for, and who to look at.

 

What that looks like

 

Our passage today begins in verse 6 with these words: “Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him.” Walking in the Bible is a common metaphor for living, so verse 6 is telling us that the life we are to live after we have received Christ is a continuation of how we began. It’s telling us to continue with Christ as we began with Christ. It’s as you received Christ Jesus the Lord that you continue walking in him.

 

How did we receive Christ Jesus the Lord? Chapter 1 of Colossians tells us what it looked like in Colossae: Epaphras came, taught the Colossians the gospel, and they believed it. What verse 6 of our passage tells us is that upon doing so, they received a person: Christ Jesus the Lord himself. When a woman marries a man, what does she receive? You could say she receives his name, his possessions, his inheritance, and that’s all true, but most fundamentally, she receives him, and those other things come to her because they are there in him. So also in the gospel, it is Christ himself who is held out to us, and when we believe in him, we receive him. We could say, then, that what it looks like first to continue with Christ as you began with Christ is to continue hearing, learning, and understanding the gospel, since it is by that means that we first received Christ Jesus the Lord. We continue the way we began.

 

This is why a worship gathering like this is so vital to our Christian lives. It’s not simply because, “Well you know I’m a Christian and good Christians are supposed to go to church.” It’s because it’s in these gatherings that we hear the gospel preached together, it’s in these gatherings that we sing the words of the gospel to one another, and it’s in these gatherings that we see the gospel displayed in the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Sometimes Christians think the gospel is for unbelievers—we’re already saved, but they still need to hear the message of salvation. Yes, if you are a believer in Jesus, you are already saved—you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, AND, you still need to hear the message of salvation over and over again, because it’s just as we received Christ Jesus the Lord that we walk in him. Knowing you’re supposed to go to church can help you remain disciplined on the Sundays you don’t feel like going, but the reason you’re supposed to go is not arbitrary, like God just wants to keep you busy or something. The reason we are supposed to do this is because we all still need the gospel, week-in and week-out. More than that, we need the gospel day-in and day-out. That’s one reason we not only need pastors, but fellow church members, to remind one another of the gospel day by day. It’s one reason many Christians find it helpful to read the Bible daily, because in it we read the good news over and over again.

 

We then get this image of plant life from verse 7, where we read that we have been rooted in Christ. When you receive Christ Jesus the Lord, new spiritual life begins in you that flows to you from him. Your roots are sunk down in him, but there is still more to be done to be built up and established in the faith you were taught, as verse 7 goes on to say. If we are to go on to maturity, then, we must continue as we began, rather than constantly pulling ourselves out and looking for better soil. If you do ever feel like Jesus isn’t doing much in your life, there are many possible explanations for that—perhaps you came into the Christian life with a false expectation of what it would look like: That it would be a life of mental ease and serenity, or a life of prosperity, only to discover that the way of the cross is, as it turns out, often difficult. Perhaps you’ve subtly replaced the gospel with the law, and are worn out simply trying harder to do more for God without really stopping to continue hearing the gospel for yourself. Perhaps you never truly understood the gospel and believed it. But another simple and common explanation is that you’re impatient. You have been rooted in Christ by faith, and you are being built up and established in the faith, but it’s not very flashy, you’re still regularly reminded of the ways you fall short, and so you start looking for better soil.

 

What’s the antidote to that? Look at where verse 7 ends: “abounding in thanksgiving”. It’s hard to feel bored and unsatisfied in Christ if you are abounding in thanksgiving. I confess that I give thanks because I do sometimes feel thankful, and because I know I am supposed to. That said, I doubt anyone close to me would say that I “abound in thanksgiving”; how about you? The implication here, though, is that if we are not abounding in thanksgiving, we are missing what is ours in Christ. In Colossians 1 we saw that we were alienated from God, hostile in mind, and doing evil deeds. Given that, the fact that any good comes to us is an amazing gift of God’s grace. Yet we have not only received life, breath, and our daily bread from God…we have received Christ. And God is now building us up and establishing us in the faith, transforming us from one degree of maturity to another, so that we might be holy and blameless and above reproach before him in the end. That progress may appear slow to you, but if you have been rooted in Christ, it is happening. Don’t let your perception of the lack of progress cause you to look elsewhere. Continue with Christ as you began with Christ, and abound in thanksgiving that there is any progress at all. As the great pastor John Newton once said, “I am not what I ought to be, I am not what I wish to be, I am not what I hope to be; but I thank God, I am not what I once was, and I can say with the great apostle, ‘By the grace of God I am what I am.”

 

So what’s it look like to continue with Christ as you began with Christ? It looks like continuing to hear, learn, and understand the gospel. It looks like staying firmly rooted in Christ. It looks like God working in you to progressively transform you to greater maturity. It looks like abounding in thanksgiving. But there is also something to look for, so let’s look at that next in verse 8.

 

What to look for

 

To return to the walking metaphor, when you go for a walk, you do often have to be on the lookout, not only for where you are going, but for dangers you may encounter along the way. In Philadelphia there are a lot of cars on the road, and not all of them obey the traffic laws to perfection. Especially at night when you are walking home, a friend might say to you, “Keep your head on a swivel”, because crime is more likely to occur at night. Well in verse 8 of our passage, God basically tells us, “Keep your head on a swivel”. See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.

 

Philosophy is a Greek word that comes from the two Greek words for love and knowledge, and we have already seen in Colossians the positive place of knowledge (1:6-7, 9; 2:2-3), so this doesn’t mean all pursuit of knowledge is somehow bad. The philosophy we must look out for and be on guard against is that which is deceptive, which comes according to human tradition, the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. We can’t reconstruct all the details of what the false teachers who were trying to influence the Colossians were saying, but it does seem clear from the rest of the book that they were offering the Colossians a deeper spiritual experience, a more fulfilling life, if they would just add to their faith in Christ certain rituals and observe certain laws. And the warning of verse 8 is of perennial necessity because there will always be human traditions and philosophies that make natural sense, but are not according to Christ. They come about any time humans, apart from God’s special revelation, try to figure out how attain a deeper spiritual experience or a more fulfilling life.

 

We could take Buddhism as an example. It suggests an eightfold path toward nirvana: right view, right resolve, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right samadhi, which is basically meditation. If you asked a group of your neighbors today to come up with a way to be more spiritual, wouldn’t you expect some combination of these things to show up? Live rightly, think rightly, practice mindfulness, meditate. Even the atheist Sam Harris once commented that if he weren’t to be an atheist, he’d probably be a Buddhist, because at least it makes psychological sense. That’s natural religion—what makes natural sense, even to an atheist. Under the banner of those who profess Jesus Christ as Lord, as it seems the Colossian false teachers still did, we can think of the many rituals and teachings of the Roman Catholic Church that are the product of human tradition and offer to give us a deeper spiritual experience than the simple path of the gospel held out to us in scripture—getting ashes on your forehead, fasting during Lent, praying the rosary, confessing sins to a priest, followed by works of satisfaction, priestly vestments, incense, and veneration of images. If you ask a group of humans to make up a religion, those are the sorts of things they usually come up with. Under the Protestant banner, one of the largest churches in America today, Bethel Redding, claims to encounter falling gold dust, angel feathers, and visions of a glory cloud in their services. That sure sounds like a deeper spiritual experience, doesn’t it?

 

And, of course, in the “post-Christian” West, many of these spiritual practices have also been secularized into modern psychology. Mindfulness, meditation, and yoga, for example, all of which have historic roots in Hinduism or Buddhism, are now suggested by therapists to address mental health struggles. Amazon’s current #1 bestselling book in Nutrition is Good Energy by Casey Means, a Stanford-trained medical doctor who writes to give readers a path to greater wellness centered on what she calls “good energy”. Throughout the book she talks about things like “mindful eating”, “the miraculous flow of cosmic energy from the sun”, and “the spiritual dimension of food”. She even advocates the use of psychedelic mushrooms and describes a time when she felt “one with the moon” in the desert. That sounds pretty spiritual for a book about nutrition. A recent episode of NPR’s It’s Been a Minute was entitled, “Goodbye, church…Hello, Wellness Industrial Complex”, in which they explored the ways health and wellness have taken on a spiritual flavor and serve as a kind of religion for modern Westerners. Rina Raphael appeared on the podcast, the author of a book entitled The Gospel of Wellness, and here’s how she put it:

“There is almost this secular salvation of, like, I will make myself fit. I will make myself well. I will make sure that I have all these incredible values about tending to myself…I make the argument that wellness acts like a deconstructed religion. It’s like a regulated framework instructing us how to live our lives.”

 

From traditional religion to the modern megachurch to the modern wellness industry, the thing to realize is that behind these offers of a more fulfilling life or a deeper spiritual experience there is a philosophy, and while there may be ways we as Christians can learn from them, we need to keep our heads on a swivel, lest we be taken captive by the entire philosophy. Take yoga for example. On one level, yoga is stretching, and many testify that doing such stretches helps not only their body, but even their stress levels. The Bible gives us no reason to demonize that as such. But typically the people teaching yoga aren’t thinking of it as “just stretching”. It was originally part of a philosophy handed down in various human traditions which taught that it was a union of the individual self with the universal consciousness. Even Wikipedia defines it as “aimed at controlling body and mind to attain various salvation goals.”

 

So what’s that mean? Don’t stretch? No, but it does mean that you need to see to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit that is not according to Christ. There are many today holding out to you the offer of a deeper spiritual experience or a more fulfilling life, and you shouldn’t just read their books, listen to their podcasts, and dabble in their practices without considering what they are really inviting you into, and considering why it has such an appeal to you. What is it offering you that isn’t already yours in Christ? And do you really need it? If not, why do you want it? Is it because you’ve subtly begun to believe that the gospel isn’t working? Is it because you’ve subtly gotten bored with Christ? The ultimate antidote to that is not to beat yourself up for it—it is to go back to Christ, and continue with him, just as you began with him. So finally, let’s consider who to look at.

 

Who to look at

 

Look at where Paul goes in verse 9. Why is it so important that you not be taken captive by philosophy and empty deceit? The big problem with it is right there at the end of verse 8: It is not according to Christ. Yoga, mindfulness, ashes, and visions can look so appealing, but they are not Christ. And what’s so bad about that? What’s so bad about that is that Jesus is so good, and the rest of our passage gives us just a glimpse of how good he is. Look at verse 9: In him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily. This is the wonder of the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, which teaches that in Jesus Christ, God the Son became man, and since God the Son is fully God, the fullness of God therefore dwells in the body of Jesus Christ. Do you see what that means, then? It means there is no deity, no divinity, no “godness” to be found by us outside of Jesus Christ. There isn’t a little bit of it in Jesus, and then a little bit of it in Buddhism, and then a little bit of it in psychedelics. Jesus is the end of all FOMO on God.

 

If you are here today and you are not a Christian, maybe you appreciate something about Jesus, and you have thought that you can take what is good from him and combine it with what is good from other religions and philosophies. But what if the whole fullness of God dwells in him, and you are actually missing out on it because you won’t just commit to him? Humans need water to live—imagine you live in a town with one fountain of water in it that never fails to produce clean drinking water. Where would you need to go to get the water you need? You’d need to keep going back to that fountain, over and over again, because there is nowhere else to get it. You could say, “Come on; there can’t be just one source of clean water” and you could go try the liquids your neighbors are mixing up, but if in reality that’s the only source of water in the town, you’ll be taking yourself away from it as you go looking for others. You’ll be filling up on junk instead of the water you really need. And as your body was made to run on water, your soul was made to run on communion with the true God, and all the fullness of God dwells in Christ. Don’t go looking for more of God elsewhere.

 

And here’s the next crazy thing: Not only does the fullness of deity dwell in Christ, but you have been filled in him, verse 10 says. That doesn’t mean you are now divine like Jesus is, but it does mean that since all the fulness of deity dwells in Christ, if you have received Christ Jesus through faith, you have him in you! The fountain of water you need is already in you. You don’t need more than him; you need more of him. The way forward is deeper in, not further on. The roots need to go deeper, not get planted elsewhere.

 

I mentioned earlier that when a woman marries a man, she most fundamentally gets him, but then she does also get whatever is his. So the rest of our passage spells out what we also get, in getting Christ. Verse 11 says that in him we were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which we were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead. Bear with me, because this is glorious, but also dense and not simple to understand at first. Circumcision is the cutting off of flesh, and God mandated before the time of Christ that Israelites circumcise their male children on the eighth day from their birth. This was meant to signify to the Israelites their need for a deeper circumcision: A circumcision of the heart (e.g., Jer 4:4), whereby the sinful heart with which we were born would be removed, and replaced with a living heart that loves God entirely and loves our neighbor as ourselves. Israel’s circumcision showed them their need for heart circumcision, but it never provided it.

 

But what this is saying to Christians is that in Christ, you have received that circumcision, not the circumcision of foreskin done with hands, but the circumcision of the heart, a circumcision made without hands, whereby you have put off the body of the flesh, the sinful nature with which you were born. It is called the circumcision of Christ in verse 11 because it happens in union with Christ, as verse 12 clarifies: having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God. As Christ died on the cross and rose again, in Christ we too who believe in him have died and risen again through faith in the powerful working of God. We are now new creatures! Though our sinful nature has left some of its junk behind, it’s been evicted and expelled from the apartment of our hearts. Verse 13 summarizes: And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with Christ.

 

I mentioned earlier that we were all alienated, hostile in mind, and doing evil deeds; here we see it described as being dead in our trespasses and the uncircumcision of our flesh. Nobody believes they’re perfect, but scripture says far more: It says not only were we imperfect, as we still are, but we were dead. Nothing in us truly loved God. You may have grown up attending church services, acknowledging the existence of God, and living a morally upright, nice, life. By the world’s standards, you may have been a good person. When you hear that you were dead in your trespasses, perhaps you even wonder, “Me? What have I done that’s so bad? I don’t murder people, I don’t steal, and I only lie on rare occasions” but this passage is saying that either you are still dead in your trespasses today, or if you are a Christian, that you were at some time in the past dead in your trespasses. You may have believed in God’s existence, you may have done things he commanded outwardly, but none of us naturally did the most basic and reasonable thing he commanded: None of us naturally loved him. We were dead.

 

And yet, in Christ, God made us alive. He circumcised our hearts and raised us to new lives that really do love him and desire him above sin. Yes, we still struggle against sinful desires, but we are no longer slaves to them! Sin still calls, but we don’t have to pick up the phone. It still tries to tell us what to do, but it’s not actually our boss any longer. Does it feel that way to you? Maybe you say, “That can’t be. I still try to fight and fight the same sins but they aren’t yet gone.” In chapter 3 of Colossians we’ll learn more about how to fight sin and grow in holiness, but for now just notice this: If you are really fighting the sin, what does that indicate? It indicates that you aren’t still dead! Dead people don’t fight their deadness. To quote Newton again: “Cold and confused this heart of mine; yet since I feel it so, it yields some hope of life divine.” Be patient, and continue with Christ as you began with Christ, because the reality is that if you are in Christ, you have been made alive. Sin does not have dominion over you, and it will not defeat you in the end.

 

In Christ you have been filled, in Christ you have been made alive, and in Christ you have been forgiven, but before I get to that, a brief word on baptism. Did you notice in verse 12 that Christians are described as having been buried with him in baptism, in which they were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God? A couple things to notice: First, notice that the verse assumes that faith was active in the baptism of the saints and faithful brothers in Colossae. That is one reason we, along with Baptist, Anabaptist, and even Pentecostal churches throughout the world, only baptize those who give a credible profession of faith in Christ. There are Christians who argue that we should also baptize the infant children of such believers. We call them paedobaptists, paedo being the Latin word for a child, while those who hold that only those who credibly profess faith in Christ should be baptized are called credobaptists, credo being the Latin word for “I believe”. Though I think paedobaptists are wrong on this point, I love them and am thankful to call many of them my brothers and sisters in Christ. This is a debate between Christians, and yet insofar as we want to live lives fully pleasing to God, I want to take just a moment to engage the paedobaptist argument for baptizing the infant children of believers, given that verse 12 seems to assume that those being baptized are themselves believers.

 

When credobaptists point out to paedobaptists that Colossians 2:12 assumes the presence of faith in those baptized, paedobaptists typically say that’s because the letters of the New Testament, including Colossians, were written to new converts. So for them, of course, faith was active in baptism, but not in their infant children who were also baptized. But if the paedobaptist account is true and the children of the Colossians were also baptized automatically upon the conversion of their parents, then by the time Paul writes this letter, many children should have been baptized, and we know that Paul is also writing to children in this letter because he specifically addresses them in chapter 3, verse 20. So if the paedobaptist account is true, then here’s the image to have in your mind: This letter is sent to the church in Colossae, and when the church gathers, not only the converts, but their baptized children, also gather. How then could Paul write to that whole group and say that you were raised with Christ through faith in the powerful working of God, if, according to the paedobaptist account, many of the infant children didn’t in fact have faith when they were baptized?

 

The better explanation is that Paul could write this because he assumes that the only people getting baptized were those who themselves credibly professed faith in Christ, as credobaptists like myself contend. While baptism does not itself cause one to be born again, it is a sign of the new birth. It is the place where one visibly is buried with Christ as they are lowered into the water, and is visibly risen to new life with Christ as they come up from the water. It is the means through which one is visibly identified as a saint and faithful brother, as Paul calls the Colossians in his initial address of the letter, though technically one is born again the moment they believe, and even logically prior to believing. Of course, many of you here today were already baptized upon your profession of faith in Christ Jesus, and so verse 12 may not need much explanation in your case. But there may be others here today who claim to be believers in Jesus Christ, but who have not yet been baptized, or are still holding on to their infant baptism as true baptism. Would you be willing to assess that against the evidence of verse 12? If Paul could assume that all the Colossians had been baptized, and that their faith was active in baptism, what does that suggest about what God expects of you if you now profess faith in Christ? You can say that you publicly professed your faith in confirmation, but where do you find the rite of confirmation in the Bible? In the Bible, the rite through which one first publicly professes faith in Christ is baptism, and we do not have the authority to substitute another.

 

Ok, back to what we have in Christ. In Christ you have been filled, in Christ you have been made alive, and in Christ you have been forgiven; we see that at the end of verse 13, where we read that God made us alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses. If you are in Christ, how many of your trespasses are forgiven? All of them—past, present, and future. How could this be? I mentioned earlier that we deserve God’s condemnation—how then can we be forgiven? Perhaps you think that God is a nice guy up in the sky, and so of course he’d overlook our minor foibles. But we don’t just have minor foibles. We were dead in our trespasses. There is no doubt some evil you hate—racism, child abuse, sex trafficking, because you have an internal sense of justice. But God is pure justice, such that he hates all sin with an even purer, more intense hatred. For him to simply forgive it would be no better than a judge simply letting a guilty murderer go free. How then, can he forgive it?

 

Verse 14 tells us. It says he cancelled the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. Here we have an illustration of our guilt before God as a record of debt that stood against us with legal demands. We could think of it like a rap sheet—a list of the charges against us, and the penalty owed to them. The ultimate penalty for sin is death apart from the favorable presence of God, also called hell. That’s the demand of the law against our sin, and God is just. But praise God, he is also loving and gracious, so instead of making us pay the debt, he sent his son to die on the cross, and on the cross, our sins were charged to his account instead. With the debt paid, all our sins were forgiven the moment we were united to Christ by faith. From the sins you committed before becoming a Christian, to the sins you committed on your way to church today, to the sins you will commit in the future, all of them are forgiven if you are in Christ Jesus, because all of them were already paid for by Jesus on the cross.

 

You have been forgiven in Christ, you have been filled in Christ, you have been made alive in Christ, and finally, you have been set free in Christ, as verse 15 concludes. Here Paul considers rulers and authorities, there likely a reference to demonic spiritual beings, the forces of darkness, who held us captive when were still dead in our trespasses. As long as the record of debt still stood against us, God could not bring us into new life. Justice demanded a curse, not a blessing like that. But once Christ bore the curse, he broke the claim of the forces of darkness over us. Though it looked like the forces of darkness were winning on the cross, Jesus was actually stripping them of their power, and now we have been set free from their dominion and made alive together with Christ.

 

How, then, do you continue with Christ as you began with Christ? How can you not be led astray by the offer of a deeper spiritual experience or a more fulfilling life that is not according to Christ? How can you abound in thanksgiving? You have to look at Christ, and consider who he is, and all that you have in him. In him the whole fullness of deity dwells—where else will you look for more of God? In him you have been filled—you have the God of the universe, the only one for whom your soul was made. In him you were made alive, so that now your heart really does desire and love this God for whom you were made. In him you were forgiven, so that now no more sins have the power to condemn you. In him you were set free, so that now sin, Satan, and all his demonic powers have no more dominion over you. What more do you really need? Don’t pluck up your roots and go looking for better soil. Don’t get taken captive by something else. Continue with Christ as you began with Christ.