Colossians Part 5

Who’s going to come up here and quote the second half of chapter 2? Is that correct? Where are you? Okay, Shirley, you come first. Let’s go. It looks like she’s refusing. Well, I have to stand fairly near you. Yeah. Okay.

Audience:

You were spiritually dead because of your sins and your uncircumcision; that is, in fact, you were outside of the law. God has now made you to share in the very life of Christ. He has forgiven you all your sins: God has utterly wiped out the damaging evidence of broken laws and commandments, which always hung over our heads, and has completely annulled it by nailing it over His own head on the cross. And then, having drawn the sting of all the powers ranged against us, he exposed them, shattered, empty, and defeated, in His final glorious, triumphant act. Don’t let anyone worry you by criticizing what you eat or drink, or what holy days you ought to observe, or bothering you over new moons or Sabbath. All these things have at most only a symbolic value: the solid fact is Christ. Nor let any man cheat you of your joy in Christ by persuading you to make yourselves “humble” and fall down and worship angels. Such a man, inflated by unspiritual imagination, is pushing his ways into matters he knows nothing about, and in his cleverness is forgetting his head. It is from the head alone in which the body, by natural channels, is nourished and built up and grows according to God’s laws of growth. So, if through your faith in Christ, you are dead to the principles of this world’s life, why, as if you were still part and parcel of this worldwide system, do you take the slightest notice of these purely human prohibitions? Don’t touch this, don’t taste that, don’t handle the other. This, that, and the other will all pass away after use. I know that these regulations seem wise in their self-inspired effort at worship and their policy of self-humbling and their studied neglect of the body. But in actual practice they do honor, not to God, but to man’s own pride.

What really makes this wonderful is that it is such a difficult passage, and that is so clear. Phillips, we owe you something, and you a little bit. Thank you, brother, wasn’t that beautiful? Did you follow that? That was lovely, and it’s a passage that everybody needs so much. This is good, whether you memorized it or just tried to, some of these things are going to stick in your hearts.

Now, let me just tell you that chapter 2 of Colossians is extremely difficult to get through. And yet, it only has about three or four very simple points. The problem is not so much the book as this very poor writer named Paul. Now, someone out there in video land might really be offended by that. But I just have to tell you that Paul of Tarsus was not the clearest writer who ever lived. Here are the three or four points that are covered in this chapter; they’re quite simple, really.

One of them is the dark shadow of influences that are always present over the church. They’re always there, and there’s always the temptation to fall into them. Paul then speaks of a couple of things, both about the Lord. One of them, he goes back several times to talk to you, about your redemption, which was Christ, and then he once more glorifies the Lord Jesus and talks to us about how wisdom is from Christ, knowledge is from Christ, all these things flow from the Lord. So, you have basically a remembrance of your salvation and what Christ did for you, and the greatness of this cosmological Christ and His being the source of all riches, and then this danger that is always around us, knocking at our door: substitutes for Christ. Always there are around us substitutes for Christ. And brothers and sisters, this is more subtle than you might realize. We’re not talking about somebody coming in here from Toronto, although that could very well happen. Someone coming in here from Hello, Toronto. We’re so glad to see you tonight. Those of you who are watching this 50 years after we’re all dead, there’s a revival going on in Toronto, Canada, and people are coming there from all over the world. I was told that 1/4 of all the people who get off the plane at the airport in Toronto are Christians going to visit that church there.

When you get dry, things like that really look good. But even within the church, when we get dry, sometimes we start picking up little things, and they’re not even dangerous unless you just keep on picking them up, and you just can’t find the Lord Jesus Christ, or someone doesn’t come to remind you of Him. One of the things I do, do you know the main thing I do in Chicago is remind you of the Lord Jesus Christ, and we all need that. And I want to remind you of something, it’s good for you to remind other people, and it’s also something else to remind you, and that is it’s good for you to go somewhere else and remind other people. There’s not a church on this earth, but what it needs to be reminded of the Lord Jesus Christ.

You can spend the rest of your life just reminding brothers and sisters in the churches about the Lord. We all need this because there are these shadowy figures around us constantly wanting to come in, and we even unknowingly pick them up, and some of them you will never pick up because you tried them already. When you bite down on a stone, the chances of you ever picking up that stone and biting down on it again are pretty remote. It looked like a loaf of bread for sure, didn’t it? It broke every tooth in your head. You bit down on it; it even smelled like a loaf of bread, but it turned out to be a stone. Still, it is possible for us to come back to some of these things when the water runs low.

I think of men who have been very much in church life and the riches of Christ. Today, they’re assistant pastors and doing, you know, the kind of stuff that they wouldn’t have wiped their feet on at one time in their life, and they got dry, and they forgot. Reminding one another is one of the biggest projects we have.

What makes chapter 2 difficult is that Paul will talk about the Lord in his exalted state, and he’ll get off on saying something about that which you know, keep in mind, don’t do. Then he’ll come to your redemption, and then he’ll come back to this problem, and then he’ll talk about the Lord in a glorious way, and then he comes back to the problem, and it seems as though he’s jumping all over the place. It’s very hard to follow; I am not capable. You know what I’d like to do? I’d like to take all the exalted passages, put them together, all the redemptive passages, put them together, and all the negative passages, and put those together, and then I’d know what Colossians 2 is all about. Let’s see if we can’t kind of do that right now.

Alright, I’m not going to read. I’m going to ask you to help me. So, let’s all look at this. Colossians 2, page five, I want to tell you, can you find that? Okay. The chapter actually begins with another reference to this great mystery of suffering being free of space and time. Did you follow that? I hope you did. Suffering that is outside the confines of space and time. I talked to you about that last night; I just didn’t put it that way.