November 3 Sermon: Canceled Debt
Consider these questions as we look at Colossians 2:6-15:
1. How does the concept of being "under new management" relate to the believers in Colossae and their faith in Christ according to this passage?
2. In what ways does Paul emphasize the importance of being established in faith and protecting one's mind from worldly influences in this passage? How can believers apply these principles in their own lives?
3. According to Colossians 2:9-15, how does Paul highlight the supremacy of Christ? How does this understanding of Christ's supremacy affect the way believers face challenges and temptations in their lives?
Transcript:
It is likely that you have seen a sign at a business establishment that informs the customers that they are under new management. When I see this sign I generally assume that the place must have been in pretty bad shape or there must have been a series of bad customer service experiences that the new people in charge are trying to distance themselves from. Maybe you have had an experience like I had recently. You are at a hotel and you see this sign of it being under new management and at the end of your stay you wonder how bad it must have been in this place to actually be worse than what I experienced while staying there.
When you see that under new management sign you expect things to be better. You expect a change. You expect that the new management is going to make a difference.
In our passage from Colossians 2 today Paul tells these Colossian believers who have received Christ that they should walk in him. They have received Christ and now their lives should look different. They are under new management and there should be a new focus for how they live their lives in light of God’s saving work in their lives.
If you remember back to our previous weeks in Colossians, the problem going on in this church is not that they don’t believe in the saving power of Jesus but that they doubt the sufficiency of the saving work of Christ. They are trying to add things to the Christian faith in order to secure their salvation. Having established that Jesus is the highest and greatest he is now getting a little specific in what they can do to avoid this temptation. As I said we will see three themes coming through here in this passage today.
Believers need to be established in the faith.
Believers need to protect their minds.
Believers need to trust that Jesus is over all other powers.
The first thing that we see in this passage is that believers need to be established in the faith. The first thing that we notice here in verses is Paul doing what he normally does. The apostle usually makes sure that we understand that what we ought to do is rooted in what the established facts are. He doesn’t tell us to do something so that finally God will be pleased with us. Instead, he informs us of who we are in the Lord Jesus Christ and from there we are to understand what it is that we should do. We find this often in Paul’s letters. He spells out what God has done in Christ and then we see this familiar nine letter word, therefore.
And so he says because you have received Christ walk in him. God has given the believers in the church there in Colossae the gift of faith in Christ and so they are to now live their lives in a particular way. They are to be rooted, built up, and established. This choice of words is an illustration to us here. This is how we build something. If you want to have a good building what do you need? You need a good foundation. Think back to watching young children play with blocks. When they first start playing with them and challenge themselves to build the tower as tall as possible what do they do? They put a few blocks down and try to build straight up. I can remember kids being amazed at the way I could build a tower so much larger than them when I was watching them. But soon they realize that their construction project needs a good foundation and they start building towers much higher because they realize they have a good base.
That is what we need for our faith to be stable and secure. We need to be rooted and grounded in Christ. We need to be set deeply into God’s Word and prayer and we need to be built up in worship. Paul lets us know that this leads to something that is also foundational to the Christian life. Our being established in faith leads us to thanksgiving. That is the foundation for our Christian life. We desire to live a life that is holy not so that we can earn points with God but as a response for the gift of faith that he has given us in Christ through the Holy Spirit. We can so easily forget this. That is why our worship is structured the way it is. We come and acknowledge the majesty and holiness of God in praise to him. We confess our sins and hear of what God has done for us in the assurance of pardon and in the reading and proclamation of the Word and then we respond in gratitude and depart with a blessing to display that gratitude in our lives in God’s world. Thanksgiving is to be our natural activity as believers. We are so grateful for what God and that comes from being rooted in him and it overflows into our lives.
And so, we’ve seen in these first two verses of this passage that believers need to be established in the faith. We need to have deep roots and a good foundation in what God has done for us to stand firm in the midst of all the things that we face in the world. As we progress to our next verse, we are going to see that as believers we need to protect our minds. I believe that this is so vital for our present time that this one verse may be where we spend the majority of our time.
We see that the purpose of being rooted and established is so that these believers will not be taken captive. That’s pretty strong language there. Think about what it means to be captured. You are being held against your will. You were intending to be doing one thing but now someone has taken you and put you on a different course and you are unable to get away. Your life is now dictated by your captor.
That is what Paul is concerned philosophy and empty deceit will do to us if we are not rooted and established in faith. Now, we see this word philosophy and we probably immediately think of figures such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle and think that we either avoided those classes in school or maybe you were like me, and you came away from them thinking it was all a little weird and hard to understand and so we are safe from what Paul is referencing here.
The truth is that the philosophy and empty deceit that can hold us captive is something that we rarely learn in a class. Just this past Wednesday evening I had a conversation at our table during the LIFT meal with someone who said that they didn’t like philosophy class in college. He doesn’t really remember anything from it because it was just not practical. Yet, we all have a philosophy of life. The people who lived in the periods of these philosophers or after them had a view of the world that would have probably matched what these heady dead guys wrote about but might not have understood a word of what they wrote about.
We absorb our way of viewing the world more than we are taught it. A few years back when smart phones were a relatively new thing there was a point where a popular genre of quiz games where you would be shown a business logo that had the majority of the name of the company edited out and you had to fill in the answer. It was a good time killer and I can specifically remember a time we worked through most of one of these games together as a family driving to see family in Nebraska. We did pretty good. A few times we needed some hints but unless the logo was for something that wasn’t from a region of the country or world that we were familiar with we got most of them relatively quickly.
Now, I bring this up because we never sat down and were taught what a Burger King logo looks like. We didn’t do flash cards to learn this type of stuff. We are culturally immersed in them whether by frequenting the establishments or from advertising. They get baked down into us and we recognize them.
The philosophy of the world is happens the same way. We are immersed in a way of viewing the world just in our coming and going and we don’t even realize that it is shaping how we think. It is forming how we understand ourselves and how we see each other. It is even molding how we view God. The philosophy and empty deceit that Paul is talking about here is the idea that there are these lower spiritual beings who can disqualify them from their salvation. We can’t know for sure but I’m going to guess they weren’t sat down in formal classes and taught about this. It was instead caught from the way the people around them talked about the way they viewed reality. It may have been shown to them in the way their parents talked about spiritual things.
We need to protect our minds by thinking through where we get the way we view God and the way we view the world from. Did we get it from some sort of worldly idea or did we get it from the Word of God? It goes even further than that. Are we finding ourselves immersed in a system of morality that is informed more by the television shows and movies we watch than by the law of God. And even the harder question.....are we being held captive by it? Are we holding on to it more than we are clinging to the very word of almighty God?
This is the question Paul is asking. Are these elemental spirits or the false teachings that we see in a world that is hostile to God having the final word with us or are we letting the Word of God speak? Are our lives being directed by human traditions and ideas or are we showing wisdom and letting almighty God be our final Word?
This is kind of a gut punch, isn’t it? The reason I say that is because these ways of viewing the world, like I said are probably aren’t something that we were formally taught. They come about from us absorbed from what is around us and it can cause you to wonder if this is so embedded deep within me that I wouldn’t even realize that my thinking has been influenced by it. In other words, I think we want to change but we might not even realize that we need to.
That is why we need to make sure that as believers that we to protect our minds because there is a two way expressway between our head and our hearts right. How we feel about something is going to affect how we think and how we think is going to affect how feel? Our minds are the on ramp and we need to control the traffic or we can end up with a traffic jam and 20 car pile ups trying to sort out how we are to live in God’s world.
And this is why as believers we need to be rooted and established in the faith and it helps us as believers to protect our minds. And to do this we need to truly understand something about our Lord and Savior. He is truly above all things.
He immediately goes to the idea that Jesus is God in human flesh. He says it as clearly as can be stated. He goes back to the supremacy of Jesus over all things and wants his readers to know that Jesus is more than just an average, everyday, ordinary man. He is God in human flesh. Over the course of Christian history and into our day there have been those who deny this truth. Either they teach that Jesus is just a spirit who just appears to be human, or they teach that Jesus was just a man. Paul is so clear here. Neither of those views work with what he says. He has a body and in it the deity dwells. In order to hold to either of the incorrect views I just mentioned you have to deny what scripture openly and clearly teaches.
And Paul uses this to truth to remind us that we are filled with him. We are in Christ, and we have the blessing of being in him. This has far reaching implications for us. It means that we have a sign on us. Just as circumcision was a sign of the covenant in the Old Testament now, we have a sign that we are in the covenant in the waters of baptism.
His big point in this passage is that we belong to Jesus Christ. Just as circumcision was showing that the people were set apart so now being buried with Jesus in baptism and raised in faith is a sign that we are set apart. A sign that we are different. A sign and a seal on us saying that we are under new management.
And notice what Paul says this is. It is the powerful working of God. Look at the familiar language we see here. It says that Jesus was raised from the dead and now he goes back to what we saw in Ephesians 2 verse 1 several months ago. He says that we were dead in our trespasses and but now God has made us alive.
His point is that this gift of faith has brought you to life. You didn’t do this. God did. He is the one who forgave all your trespasses and canceled the record of debt that stood against you.
You’ve got to love it when God’s holy Word gives you an illustration to give you a deeper understanding of what is being taught. We all can get this idea of canceled debt. We live in an era where it is likely that we owe someone for something. Everything from home to a business and even our educations. Imagine if someone showed up and said that your indebtedness was gone. How could you ever express how much you appreciate what they did for you? It would impact your life dramatically. You would wake up the next day and ask yourself it really happened because it would be unbelievable. You would have a spring in your step. But there is something to make sure we don’t miss here. This canceling of our debt was not just a bank error in your favor. The legal demands had a price that were paid for them. They were nailed to the cross.
By doing this we are told that this disarmed the rulers and authorities. Nobody has a claim on us except Jesus and he not only won he put all other things to shame. Once again, we are meant to see that Jesus is higher than anything else. These things we might think can affect our relationship to God and can oppose us they are not just a tiny tier below Jesus they are nothing. They have been put to shame. This isn’t a cosmic battle that is up for grabs. Our great God and king has obliterated his enemies and has taken hold of us, his people. So, we as believers trust that there is nothing that can snatch us from his hand. The one who holds us is beyond equal.
And so we have seen these three truths that we need to cling to. What can we take away from them to use in our life in the coming week as we desire to serve God?
I find two chief challenges for us this week from this text as we go out from here into the world.
First, let us take an honest evaluation of what it is that is influencing how we view the world. What is the philosophy or the empty deceit that has the potential to take you captive or maybe it has already taken you captive? We all have them and so often they have become such a part of us that we don’t even realize how much weight it carries in our lives and how we think. This week let’s take a moment to assess what we allow onto the on ramp of our minds. How much of it is according to human tradition and how much is in alignment with the word of God? There is a call on us as believers to protect our minds. We can’t do that if we are mindlessly absorbing everything a godless culture throws our way. God has blessed us with minds that can discern right from wrong and good from evil. May we be honest with ourselves about how this is affecting the God’s call on our lives to be holy.
Secondly, remember the supremacy of Christ. Whatever you come up against. Whatever your struggle might be. Jesus is better. This is the promise of God’s Word. Whatever the temptation you have this week remember that Jesus is better. It might be something that you find in your evaluation of what you put in your mind. In the moment these things seem like they bring satisfaction. They seem like they have what you need but they aren’t. Nothing is better than the victory that Jesus has given us over sin. We have been filled with him. He has filled us. He has triumphed over all powers. Whatever your temptation is and whatever sin has you feeling like there is no victory over it, Jesus is better. You are a new creation in Christ. You are under new management. Sin is not in control of you God in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit defines who you are, not your sin.
As we are rooted and built up in him and established in faith and we abound in thanksgiving we can approach these struggles that each and every one of us has and say to our temptation that if Jesus died for me then I am free and I choose to walk in him because he is so much better. He canceled my debt. He nailed my sin to the cross and now I can walk in the newness of life because what he has given me is so much better than the sin that is in front of me.
So, brothers and sisters in Christ root yourselves in the faith and protect your hearts and minds. For Jesus has supremacy over all things and he is working in you through his word and Spirit to empower you to live a life of holiness in thanksgiving for all that he has done.
