Jesus is All You Need Col. 2: 6–12

As consumers, you will often see a product that is advertised as having extra additives to make it work better.

If you have a real bad headache, you don’t just need Tylenol, you need Extra-Strength Tylenol. If you want to really treat your car right, you don’t just use ordinary motor oil, you add Slick 50 to it.. Got some real tough stains in your laundry? Add some Wisk or Shout before you throw those clothes in the wash. Madison Ave. has taught us that everything will work better if you just add that little extra secret ingredient to it.

And that’s the situation that we face today when it comes to our understanding of spiritual things. There’s a subtle undercurrent of thinking nowadays that seems to be saying that historical, biblical Christianity all by itself just isn’t going to cut it anymore. You need to add something to it—a little pop psychology, a little New Age theology—in order to make it work.

And the passage that we’re about to study today deals with that very thing. You see the Colossian Christians were facing the same kind of pressures that we face. Just like us, they lived in an age of tremendous religious diversity—there were all sorts of religions and cults and philosophies floating around in the Roman Empire.

And the people living back in the first century did the same thing that most people do today—they kind of dabbled a little bit in all of them. They would take some pagan mythology, mix in a little humanistic Greek philosophy, add a dash of Jewish religious legalism, and they ended up mixing their own religious cocktail. And that’s where a lot of people are at today.

Now if you are a Christian living in that kind of world, you are going to be pressured into thinking that just being a follower of Jesus Christ isn’t enough—you are not very progressive if that’s all you’ve got. You need something more. You need some added truth to go with what you’ve got. You need a deeper experience to get you to a new level of spiritual sophistication.

One of the questions I’m going to be dealing with tonight at Ask the Pastor is about a church that became involved in something called the “fullness” movement. And then they moved on from that to something called the “Toronto Blessing”—all in an effort to find that deeper experience of the Christian life that they felt they were missing.

Well what about all of this? What does the Word of God say that we need in order to make our Christian life really full and satisfying?

It says one thing, and one thing only—Jesus Christ is all you need. We find that in Colossians 2, and I’d invite you to turn there now. It’s on page 1166 of the pew Bible. You might also want to dig out the sermon study notes that you’ll find in your bulletin.

Now there are four things that Paul stresses in the passage that begins at verse 6:

1. We need to continue in Christ

Colossians 2:6 So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness.

2. We need to be careful not to be captured by deceptive ideas that masquerade as the truth

Colossians 2:8 See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ.

3. We are complete in Christ—we don’t need “something more” than what we have in Him

Colossians 2:9 For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and you have been given fullness in Christ, who is the head over every power and authority.

4. We have been circumcised in Christ—he has performed a kind of spiritual surgery on us that enables us to live the Christian life to the full

Colossians 2:11 In him you were also circumcised, in the putting off of the sinful nature, not with a circumcision done by the hands of men but with the circumcision done by Christ, having been buried with him in baptism and raised with him through your faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead.

Now let’s look at these things in detail:

1. We need to continue in Christ.

The word “continue” speaks of movement. The KJV uses the word “walk”. A Christian who is not walking with Christ, and growing in Christ is an open target for the enemy to attack and destroy.

We had a lot of ice on the roads on Thanksgiving day. And if you’ve ever tried to drive your car up an icy hill, you know you have to keep moving. As long as you keep moving forward, you’re going to be okay. But as soon as you lose that forward momentum, you’re in trouble.

Well the Christian life is a lot like that. You can’t throw yourself in “neutral” spiritually. Either you keep moving forward or you are going to be slipping backwards. We’ve got to be “moving on to maturity” as it says in Hebrews 6:1.

Now how do we do this? Well, we do it by faith. It says in v. 6 “Just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in him.”

How did you receive Christ? You received Christ by faith. So that’s how you are to continue in him.

Doing it by faith means that you’re not going to be doing it by feelings. There are going to be a lot of times that you don’t feel like continuing in your Christian life. But do it anyway! That’s where faith comes in.

And there may be some times that you don’t feel like you are making much progress. But keep going, by faith. Don’t give up. Walk by faith and not by sight. You may be making more progress than you realize.

So that’s how you continue in Christ—you continue by faith. But what do you do to continue in Christ. The answer is found in verse 7. There are four things given to us here:

1. Be rooted.

I used to live out west in Colorado and we would often see tumbleweeds blowing across the roads out there. Well a lot of Christians are like tumbleweeds. They don’t have their roots down in the Word of God, so they are blown about by every wind of doctrine or teaching that comes along.

God wants us to be like trees, not tumbleweeds. Psalm 1 tells us that the godly person is like a tree planted by streams of water. He’s got his roots down in the Word of God.

The first key to continuing in Christ is to be rooted in the Word. If you are not spending significant personal time in the Word of God, don’t expect to be making spiritual progress.

2. Be built up

Picture one of the great skyscrapers in NY City. When they go to build one of those buildings, what do they do first? They dig the foundation first. And the higher the building is going to be, the deeper the foundation has to be. The World Trade Center has a foundation that goes down about 8 or 10 storeys. And it’s a good thing, because when the terrorists tried to blow it up a few years ago, that foundation stood firm. It was solid, so the superstructure was safe.

Same thing in the Christian life. If you are rooted down, you can be built up. But how many Christians are trying to build a superstructure of good works and Christian service and Christian living on an inadequate foundation? Maybe that’s why we’re seeing so many Christian leaders falling by the wayside.

You’ve got to root down before you can build up.

3. Be strengthened in the faith as you were taught.

The Colossians learned about Christ from a man named Epaphras. He was their teacher, and they devoted themselves to his teaching. And so they were strengthened, or established, in their faith.

Solid Bible teaching needs to be a constant part of your life if you are going to continue in Christ. Satan will have a difficult time deceiving a Bible-taught Christian.

4. Be overflowing with thankfulness

This is a picture of a river overflowing its banks. We’ve seen a lot of that in Pennsylvania lately! What are we overflowing with? Thanksgiving. A thankful, grateful spirit is one of the marks of Christian maturity.

So Paul tells us in verses 6–7 that the key to continuing in Christ is to be grounded, be growing, and be grateful.

Now he warns us in verse 8 not to be captured, or captivated. The word is a military term. It refers to what a invading army does when it raids a city. The enemy carries off the people and their belongings into captivity. The KJV uses the word “spoil” as in the “spoils of war”.

The Bible says “Beware of being captured by hollow and deceptive philosophy—by religious ideas that depend on human tradition and the basic principles of the world rather than on Christ.”

There’s a lot of religious teaching out there that doesn’t come from the Bible. Some of it sounds very appealing, and looks very attractive. For example, we’re seeing more and more shows on TV now dealing with spiritual themes. And they are very well-written and very attractive. But we need to be careful. Because if these things are not based on Christ—if they are only based on the thinking of men—they are ultimately hollow and deceptive.

I have always loved chocolate. And I remember one year as a child, someone gave me a chocolate Easter bunny. And I was thrilled! I just couldn’t wait to sink my teeth into that solid rich milk chocolate! But when I took the first bite, I found to my dismay that the Easter bunny wasn’t solid—it was hollow! It was just a thin shell of chocolate around nothing but air. What a disappointment.

And that’s the way these human philosophies are. They promise fulfilment. They promise reality. But they are hollow and empty and disappointing inside.

Paul says “Beware that no one takes you captive—that no one carries you off—with these ideas.” There are a lot of people out there trying to win you over to their version of spiritual truth. Some of them even come door to door with their ideas, and their books that are supposed to add something to the Bible.

And they succeed in persuading many people. And the people they capture are not people who have never gone to church and are totally uninterested in spiritual things. No, they capture the people who have gone to church and are interested in spiritual things, but who have never been grounded in the truth.

False cults don’t go out and win the lost, they kidnap new Christians, and untaught Christians who are on the fringes of the church. That’s obviously Satan’s strategy.

Why would Satan want to spend time getting the lost to join a cult. He’s already got the lost in his camp. He wants to steal new believers, or potential believers, away from the church. And he uses the cults, with their false philosophies, to do it.

So don’t become a captive. How do you discern false teaching? It’s very simple. Just ask “What emphasis does this teaching place on the person and work of Christ?” If it devalues Him—if it puts Him in the background, or makes Him subordinate to some new revelation, some new truth; or if it teaches that you need some new experience to supplement your experience with Christ, then that teaching is wrong and dangerous. It is false teaching.

The reason is because the Bible teaches us that Christ is all we need. We are complete in Christ. Look at verses 9–10…

For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and you have been given fullness in Christ, who is the head over every power and authority.

Don’t let anybody tell you that if you only have Christ, you don’t have enough. Jesus Christ is the fullness of all that God is. God didn’t hold something of himself back to show to us another way. In Christ, he revealed all of Himself to us. So when we come into a relationship with Jesus Christ, we are coming into a relationship with God Himself. And we don’t need anything more than that.

We don’t need a second blessing; we don’t need a fuller filling; we don’t need a cleaner cleansing; we don’t need a better baptism; we don’t need anything more than what we have in Christ. Because when we have Christ, we have it all. We are spiritually complete in Him. We have fullness in Him.

Ladies, a lot of you went through the wonderful experience of childbirth. I want you to think about that. What’s the very first thing you did after you gave birth to one of your children and you held that little baby in your arms? You counted its fingers and toes, right? You checked out your baby to make sure it came with all its equipment.

When a healthy human baby is born, it comes with two arms, two legs, a pair of eyes, a mouth, a nose, a brain, and all the other necessary equipment. And it also comes with an appetite. Boy, does it have an appetite!

Now what is the growth and development of that baby going to be dependent upon? Is it going to be dependent upon some day adding another arm or another leg or perhaps another brain? No, of course not—it already has all of the body parts it needs. It doesn’t need any more.

No, the growth of that baby is simply a matter of feeding that appetite. Babies grow by nutrition, not by addition. And the same is true of Christians. Our spiritual growth is not a matter of addition; it is a matter of nutrition. We are complete in Christ from the moment we are born again.

Now we need to feed on Christ; to crave the pure milk of the Word, and to eventually be able to eat the solid food of spiritual truth that is contained in the Bible. This is how we will grow to spiritual maturity. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that you are missing something in Christ. You don’t have to add anything to your relationship with Him.

You want to know the reason why Christ is all we need? Because only Christ could circumcise us spiritually. Verse 11 says that we have been circumcised in him in the putting off of the sinful nature. Now what does that mean?

Well, I’m sure you are aware of the practice of the Jewish people, who circumcise their little boys to show that they are children of the covenant that God made with Abraham. That sign involves an actual cutting away of a part of the body.

But that mark is only physical. It doesn’t do anything for that individual’s spiritual condition before God. It doesn’t take away the sin that separates him from a holy God.

There’s only one thing that can take that away. And that is the spiritual surgery that Jesus performs on us when we receive him as our Savior. He circumcises us by taking away our old self—that part of us which was totally given over to sinfulness—and giving us a new self, which makes us alive to God and causes us to want to do his will.

Paul explains it another way in Romans 6:6, where he says that “our old self was crucified with Christ so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin.”

So if you are a Christian, you have had spiritual surgery. Christ is the doctor, and he has removed that old self—he has cut it away, just as you would circumcise a male child—and he has given you a new self. And only Christ could do that—this kind of circumcision can’t done by the hands of men, but only by the hands of God.

And that old self was buried with him in baptism, as it says in v. 12. In the NT, the word “baptize” has both a literal and a figurative meaning. The literal meaning is to dip or to immerse. The figurative meaning is “to be identified with”.

For example, in 1 Corinthians 10:2, it says that the Israelites “were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.” Well, obviously they weren’t baptized into water because they crossed through the Red Sea on dry land. What it means is that, in this experience, the nation was identified with Moses.

Now Paul uses the word in that sense here. When a person is saved, he is immediately baptized by the Spirit into the Body of Christ and identified with its Head, the Lord Jesus Christ. (The ordinance of water baptism, which comes later, is just a picture of that spiritual experience.)

So our identification with Jesus means that whatever happened to Christ also, in a sense, happened to us. When he died, we died with him. When he was buried, we were buried with him. When he rose from the dead, we rose with him. And now we have a new life. That’s what it means to be born again.

But you say, “Wait a minute. If I’m a new creature—if I’ve been given a new self that is alive to God, why do I still sin? Why am I still tempted? Why do I still fall?”

Very simple. The old self is dead but the old sinful nature is still alive. The way that the NIV translates verse 11 can lead to some confusion. The sinful nature is not what Christ circumcised—the Greek word that is used there literally means “the body of flesh”, and it is referring to the old self.

The old sinful self has been stripped away by Christ, but the old sinful nature—the habits, the thought-patterns, the behaviors of that old way of life still cling to us and we need to actively cast those things off, as Paul teaches us in Col. 3:5ff.

You see, our sinful self is dead, but our sinful nature is very much alive and we still need to deal with it and struggle with it every day. Look at it this way.

Suppose you work in an office where the office manager is an absolute tyrant. He treats you terribly—he demeans you and belittles you and he treats you like dirt. He makes you do unethical things that you’d rather not do, and every day at the office is just an ordeal. You feel like a slave.

And this begins to have a real negative effect on you. You approach every day with fear and dread of what the boss is going to do to you next. You become very secretive and you develop all kinds of little strategies for coping with this horrible situation. You begin to act like a slave.

But then one day, you come into the office and you find out that your old boss is gone. He has been fired. And he has been replaced by a boss who is kind and considerate and understanding. He treats you with dignity and respect. He treats you like a friend. What a relief! So you begin to look forward to coming to work again.

But unfortunately, you find that all those years of slavery under the old boss have left scars on you. You have developed some habit patterns that are hard to break. The old slave-driver is gone, and you’ve got a wonderful new boss to work for, but the old habit patterns are still there.

That’s what the Christian life is like. We’ve got a new boss—Jesus—but we’ve still got the old behaviors. The old self is dead—it doesn’t have anymore authority over you. And the new self is alive, and growing. But that old nature still clings to us and trips us up.

And you can’t reform the old nature. Salvation is not the improving of the old nature; it’s the imparting of a new nature. We’re going to find out later in Colossians some strategies for dealing with the old nature.

But in the meantime, we can rejoice that Christ has circumcised us; and that we are complete in Him. So let’s not be captured by those who say that Christ is not enough; let’s just continue in Him for His glory.