Songs that we just sang, living for Jesus and take time to be holy.
Talk about our relationship with the Lord as believers. Talk about how we should live our lives. Talk about what should be the significance and what is important to us.
As Paul is writing this letter to the church at Colossae. Remember I said that there was already false teaching that was coming into the church. That Satan was using to undermine the significance and the importance of the gospel.
And attempts to make it Jesus and something else. And thus by doing that creating a different Jesus, a different gospel. And a different purpose for living.
Paul is challenging these people in the first portion of the letter. Which we went back and also reviewed a little bit last week. Paul is encouraging the people to be rooted and grounded in the Lord.
To be walking in Him, to making our focus Jesus. If we don’t make our focus the Lord. We can use all of the spiritual terms and all the correct Christian language and it means nothing.
As we’re looking at Paul’s letter. He comes to a little paragraph here. Where he deals with some of the false doctrines that are coming into the church.
How does false doctrine enter into our lives? How do we begin to accept that which isn’t biblical? How does it even undermine in Christian’s lives our focus? Our commitment? Our desire? And our longing to do what God would have us do? Because when you begin to allow Satan to get you to think of anything but what God presents in His word as truth. What you do is you take your eyes off of Jesus. You grieve and quench God’s spirit.
And you begin to stumble in your walk as a Christian. And you begin to become ineffective in your ability to be a witness. Because you’ve allowed something that isn’t true to influence you.
I’d just like to read beginning at verse 11 where Paul talks about legalism. Through the end of the chapter. And in the middle portion he talks about mysticism coming into our lives.
In the last paragraph of this particular portion of his letter that we’re looking at this morning. He talks about the Sanatism. Or somehow I have to do all these special things.
Let’s just read God’s word. Colossians 2:11-23
In whom also ye are circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, in putting off the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ:
12 Buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised him from the dead.
13 And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses;
14 Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross;
15 And having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it.
16 Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days:
17 Which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ.
18 Let no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels, intruding into those things which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind,
19 And not holding the Head, from which all the body by joints and bands having nourishment ministered, and knit together, increaseth with the increase of God.
20 Wherefore if ye be dead with Christ from the rudiments of the world, why, as though living in the world, are ye subject to ordinances,
21 (Touch not; taste not; handle not;
22 Which all are to perish with the using;) after the commandments and doctrines of men?
23 Which things have indeed a shew of wisdom in will worship, and humility, and neglecting of the body: not in any honour to the satisfying of the flesh.
Let’s just go to the Lord in prayer.
Lord I pray that you just help us to understand your word this morning. Help us to apply these truths to our lives. Lord help us to see you desire for us to walk in the power of your spirit.
The pleasing of you. And walking to show forth your power to a world that does not know you. Help us to do this we pray in Jesus name.
The apostle Paul truly understood everything he’s writing about in this little portion of his letter. He’d grown up under the legalism of the law. He was a Pharisee of Pharisees of the tribe of Benjamin.
He had gone about persecuting the church feeling he was doing God’s will until he met Jesus. The encounter on the road to Damascus transformed Paul forever. When Jesus specifically spoke to him and said, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? And why do you kick against the pricks? You could have taken a sword I bet you and just driven it through Saul’s heart.
He had thought he was doing the will of God, but instead he was persecuting the very one that God had sent to redeem mankind. And everything that Jesus had been doing to get Paul to turn and go to him, Paul had kicked against and tried to get rid of it. I’ve shared with you before what kicking against the prick means.
I need to do that in case there’s some here who don’t know what it means. Because we live in a culture where we don’t use horses, we don’t use oxen. And so consequently that term is archaic in our minds.
I’ve shared with you before what kicking against the prick means. I need to do that in case there’s some here who don’t know what it means because we live in a culture where we don’t use horses, we don’t use oxen, and so consequently that term is archaic in our minds. If you had a team of horses or oxen and they did not like to pull, they did not like to go the direction you wanted them to go, what you would do is you would put pricks behind them.
And they would be a sharp object so that when the oxen or horse began to move and felt the pressure of the load, he would strike out with his heel or his foot rather to try and get rid of that load. And instead he would hit the prick and it would cause pain. And it would cause him instead to learn to pull the load and do what he was being taught to do.
The amazing thing about the Apostle Paul, God had placed him in such a unique position in his life. He had been studying under one of the great rabbis of his era. And of the two great rabbis there were at that time, he was under Gamaliel.
And that was the rabbi that you will find in Scripture when asked, what do we do with these Christians? And he says, nothing. If it’s of God, we can’t stop it. And if it’s not of God, they’ll disappear.
It was in essence his answer. That’s a misquote, but it’s a paraphrase. The Apostle Paul studied under him.
The Apostle Paul was a brilliant man. He knew Greek and Roman culture. He knew the Greek philosophers and he knew the law and the Hebrew Scripture.
But none of that could save him. It was a preparation for him, but it couldn’t save him. Only when he met Jesus and bowed the knee and humbled himself before Christ was Paul saved.
The transformation in Paul’s life was so dramatic that he went from someone who persecuted the church, was seeking to have Christians put to death, put in prison, silenced, to one that God used to reach out to us, the Gentiles. Not only that, to continually go forth no matter what would get in his way. Whether he be persecuted, jailed, beaten, left for dead, rejected by some of the very people that he’d been instructing in the Gospel.
He never stopped, even to the point that he’s writing these letters from prison to encourage Christians. And what is he doing in this letter? He’s telling us, where do your focus and your eyes need to remain? On Jesus. On Jesus.
And understand that if you begin to allow anything to get between you and your focus, it can impact your ability to walk in holiness and righteousness, in obedience to God. But more significantly, it can cause you to lose sight of the very thing that you were saved to do. Bring glory to God and proclaim His truth to those who don’t know Him.
Satan doesn’t care if a person’s religious, if they act like a demon from hell, as long as they don’t turn to Jesus. And the thing is, I’ve mentioned it before, he hates everything God loves. And if you look at our culture, if you look at the value system and how it’s been transformed in our culture, from one that honored the family, to one where marriage isn’t held in high esteem anymore, from one that honored children and looked at them as a blessing, to one that is willing to murder our own kids, to one where you wanted people to know the principles of God’s Word that they could turn to the Lord, to one that transforms God’s Word into something different.
Paul saw that this was actually happening even during his lifetime. I want you to see here, verse 8, which we didn’t read. He says, Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, and the tradition of men, and the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.
Satan wants to combine worldly philosophies with biblical Christianity to confuse Christians and prevent the gospel from going forward and doing its duty. Paul says, we don’t have to fear, though. Because he says the amazing thing is that Jesus is greater than any principality or power in this world or in the world that we cannot see.
Paul talks about some of the ways that Satan has done this. The rudiments of the world. The philosophy of the world.
And you can see this philosophy has permeated our public school system. It’s permeated even many Christian schools. Replacing the Bible with psychological thought.
Replacing the fact that the Scriptures say that every man needs a Savior. Every man, woman, and child is a sinner that needs to be saved by the grace of God. And replacing it with, well, basically people are good.
They’ve just gone astray. They’ve had bad influences in their life. And when one does that, it begins to transfer the eyes from what Jesus said is real to that which the world said is real.
That is the law. And he begins to do that in some very interesting ways. The first thing he does is to undermine the authority of Jesus.
I believe the average Christian today does not look at Christ typically. We were looking at Jesus in Hebrews in the adult Sunday school class. We’re going through the book of Hebrews.
And as we’re going through the book of Hebrews, one of the amazing things that you see is who Jesus is. How great he is. That truly he’s God and did not have to come to earth.
Did not have to take on the form of a man. Did not have to die on the cross. Yet he willfully chose to do that to ridicule us.
And to transform our lives and our character. And make us a new creature in him. And give us a new heart.
And forgive our sins. Even as David wrote in that Psalm 51, that beautiful Psalm, where David’s confessing what he has done. And his only hope is not in the fact that he was the greatest king that has ever lived in Israel.
It wasn’t in the fact that he’d done all these marvelous things for the Lord. But it was because of God’s mercy. He cried out to God’s mercy and grace.
And he said, you are the one that can forgive my sin. And so Satan wants us to lose sight of who Christ is. His power, his authority.
He’s God. And the fact that he, who is God and without sin, came and took the sin of the world on himself and didn’t have to. So the world wants to transform our thinking and get us to think other things.
And they say, no, you can do it yourself. That’s a lie from the pit of hell. That’s Satan.
The first thing that Paul mentioned was the law. But then, if we could just get our eyes on something else according to Satan, to take our eyes off Jesus. And he brings into the church today mysticism.
You know what the greatest mark in a Christian’s life is? It’s not mystical experiences. If you go on YouTube today, you will see all kinds of people who said, I died and went to heaven. Yet, my Bible doesn’t say that that’s something you do.
We die and go to heaven if we’re a believer, but we don’t come back to earth. It was alluded to in our Sunday school class that there are even pastors in the church today that want so badly to speak with their deceased children, that somehow God’s made an exception to necromancy and speaking to the dead, and it’s okay in their case, because their son brings them these wonderful messages from the other side. And I’m going, what is wrong that they don’t see God’s Word is God’s Word? And then you have other Christians and other pastors and other teachers endorsing mystical lies.
Because, well, that pastor’s got a good message. That pastor talks about revival. But you don’t teach people to look to mysticism.
You don’t teach people to look to speaking to their dead loved ones. You have a whole influence of the mystical on the way we dress, the way we conduct ourselves, the way we look. And we’re not to do things, because Paul gets into asceticism in just a moment, but you have people today that would fly in the face of what God says, and they would do things that are tied to the occult and mystical instead of the Bible.
And when you do that, you turn your back on God. And you’re saying, I’ve got special knowledge. I’ve got special understanding.
I’ve got things that I know that aren’t even in the Bible, that maybe even God speaks against. But I can do it because I’m special. And it’s interesting, Paul talks about the opposite influence, which they’re really tied together, mysticism and asceticism.
But that’s when he talks about that there are those that would think that if they just separate themselves from the world, then they’re more spiritual. And so what they do is they develop special ways of eating, special ways of dressing, special ways of some of the do’s and don’ts here. Touch not, taste not, handle not.
Do you realize that there’s been false teachings coming to the church where there was a group of Christians that said, men and women were not really created for marriage. And so marriage shouldn’t be done, but if it had to be done, it could be done, but you should never really consummate the marriage and you shouldn’t raise children. Needless to say, that cult eventually died out because they never had any kids.
But you get that weird. The very things that God gave and that He said were good, well, I’m not going to do so, I’m going to be more spiritual. Peter, who came out from under the law and was struggling to go and speak to Cornelius, who was a Gentile with the gospel, because Jews didn’t talk to Gentiles.
You remember what God did, put Peter into a deep sleep and He placed all these animals, clean and unclean, before Peter. He said, take and eat. And Peter said, well, I can’t defy myself.
And he did it again, the Lord did it again. And He told Peter, what I have made clean is important, not what you perceive. And the whole point was the Jewish people had made the Gentiles so unclean, because they were, they were pagans, they didn’t believe in God, they didn’t have any understanding of Him to a large extent.
They had their false gods, they worshipped all these horrific things, they had all these mystical practices, they worshipped idols, they worshipped angels, they worshipped whatever. But God said, they need the gospel too. They need to take it.
And guess what? I can make them clean. I can transform them. He also said that whatever we eat, we eat it giving thanks to the Lord.
You know, the missionaries, sometimes they go to cultures where they’re asked to eat some things that are really rabid. But you know, when confronted with this whole thought, the early church meetings, the first church council, basically said there were four things that we weren’t to do as Christians. One was, eat that which has been strangled or sacrificed to idols, and to drink blood, to be sexually impure.
The thing is, you didn’t have to follow the law because we were called to a higher standard. And so Paul is telling us that, and he’s saying here, which things have indeed a show of wisdom in will-worship, in humility, in neglecting of the body, not in any honor to the satisfying of the flesh, but to seek to do that which will honor the Lord, and not that which will cause us to be drawn into worldly attitude. I had a list of various churches and how Paul’s teaching has entered into the church.
And it’s very interesting. In this list, they give the biblical position on all the major doctrines. And then they give cults, those that would say they were Christian cults, those that would say that they’re non-Christian, didn’t identify with Christ at all, but what their beliefs are.
And it’s amazing, if you look at this and look at the history of them, you’ll find that some of them started out not that far off from the truth, but they allowed a little air to enter in. Seventh-day Adventists. Seventh-day Adventists, their view of the Trinity would be basically correct.
But their view of the judgment of God is totally wrong. You see, the founders of that religious system didn’t like the thought of anybody spending eternity in hell. And so they said, there is no such thing as hell.
God just causes you to disappear. You’re annihilated. That’s not what my Bible says.
So they were right here, but they’re totally wrong here. Then they begin to enter in and bring in works and the law and say, you need to keep the Sabbath, and by that they mean Saturday, Shabbat. You need to have a dietary law that’s in accordance with the Jewish requirements that are given in the law on what they’re to eat and not to eat.
And so what they do is they combine the power of the gospel with the law, and what do you end up with? A gospel that’s watered down, but it’s not the gospel. And it becomes a Jesus who isn’t the Jesus of Scripture. After the Seventh-day Adventists came the Jehovah Witnesses.
Jehovah Witnesses don’t even believe in the Trinity at all. They don’t believe that Jesus is the Son of God, but He’s God come in the flesh. And they believe that the Spirit of God is a mere spiritual force.
They believe in a salvation by works, and it has nothing. The Jesus they’ve taken, and you’re two generations away from the truth. From Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah Witnesses, nothing hardly left.
You see, you allow a little error to come in, and it always becomes greater and greater in error and never draws you closer to the truth. And that’s Paul’s concern. When we examine our lives, what motivates our life? Are we motivated to live our life because we’ve been saved by the grace and the power of Jesus? He’s transformed us.
He’s called us into this new relationship. He desires for us to accomplish great things for Him. Do you desire every day to see what God can do in your life today? Or do I slip into some form of mystical belief, asceticism, false teaching, different understandings because I don’t like something? I don’t like hell, so I’ll just eliminate it.
I don’t like the fact that God calls me to act differently than the world, so I’ll just ignore it. And pretty soon, you have a church that’s ineffectual and not powerful at all. It’s interesting, when Jesus was spreading His condemnations and commendations to the seven churches, the two churches that had no condemnations were the two smallest churches, but the two that kept true to the Word of God.
They didn’t lose their first love. They didn’t become enamored with occultic techniques and different ways of presenting the gospel. They weren’t overwhelmed with the materialism of the world and desire to come in, and like Laodicea say, we are so wealthy, and Jesus said, but you are so poor.
Possessing material wealth, but lacking completely in spiritual money. Sometimes, not look at your position and station in life in comparison to others, but look where God has placed you and look at what God can do where you are at, and who you can influence, and how you are to live your life every day, not being influenced by these other things. And Satan makes them so attractive.
I remember a number of years ago, we had a lady, she came from the Lord Jesus Christ, came out of Roman Catholicism. And for the longest time, she had a lot of problems giving up some of the things of Roman Catholicism. And in talking to her, why? Because she was drawn to the mystical part of it.
It was so enamoring to her. How could this happen? Because it wasn’t happening, it wasn’t according to the Bible. But she was held captive by the mysticism of the Roman Catholic Church.
Other people come out of a legalistic background, and are held captive by the legalism of the background that came in. Oh man, I can never ever dress any different than I’m dressing right now. Or I can never ever do this or do that.
Even though the Scriptures say there’s one way to dress, that’s modestly. That’s what the Scriptures say. It doesn’t say, and guess what? If you want to talk about dress that’s strange and how it happened, look at the Amish.
I do not know what made 1865 or whatever year they chose for their dress to be the most spiritual year. Because that’s what they wear for dress. That’s the way they decorate their houses.
Guess what? I don’t know, it’s not biblical. But they’re held captive. And many, many, I don’t even know how many are even saved in the Amish community because it allowed all of these things to impede their relationship with Jesus.
We knew people that came out of a community very similar to the Amish. And they became Christians. Became Bible-believing Christians.
On fire for Jesus Christians. Guess what happened? They got kicked out of their community. Even though if you would go in the secular world and say, what do you think of those? Oh, they’re very religious.
That community over there. They’re very religious. Look at the way they dress.
Look at the things they do. But they didn’t know Jesus. You see, the Bible gives us these amazing guidelines, but the only standard we can compare them against is Christ.
And they were given to us by Him to bring glory to Him. I want to encourage you, because the times we live in are interesting and very deceptive. And in many cases the church is being deceived today.
What you’re seeing happen in America right now, I’m so thankful for it, but also I’m concerned because there’s a lot of people that are comparing politically what’s happening, that somehow God is causing this great revival in the church, and yet we’re not seeing the difference in people’s attitudes. They’re putting their trust in men. They’re putting their trust in things.
They’re putting their trust in systems. They’re not putting their trust in Jesus. Paul’s warning.
Next week we’re going to be looking at chapter 3. He’s talking about the certainties of your calling. There’s a reason you’re called. There’s a purpose you’re called for.
And we’re going to be looking at that. Let’s just close and pray. Father, I pray that you would just help us to not be deceived by the schemes and the wiles of Satan, nor deceived by the vain philosophies of men.