Jesus is All You Need Col. 2: 6–12

Many products nowadays are advertised as having extra additives that are supposed to make them 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 engine right, add STP gas treatment next time you fill up. Got some real tough stains in your laundry? Don’t just use regular laundry detergent—use New Era because it has the new Active Stainfighter formula. Marketers have taught us that things will work much better with that extra secret ingredient or additive.

And that’s what’s happening today as people search for spiritual reality. The popular opinion nowadays is that historical, biblical Christianity just isn’t enough to meet people’s spiritual needs. You need to add something new to your spiritual life—something extra to give it an extra kick.

And the passage that we’re going to look at today deals with that very thing. You see the Colossian Christians were facing the same sort 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 circulating in the Roman Empire.

And the people living back in the first century did what many people are doing today—they dabbled a little bit in all of them. They would take some pagan mythology, mix in a little Greek philosophy, add a dash of Jewish theology, and mix their own religious cocktail. Many people are doing the same thing today in their search for spiritual reality.

Now if you are a Christian living in this environment, you are going to be tempted to think that just being a follower of Jesus isn’t enough. 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 higher plane of spiritual fulfilment.

And this trend is even in the church. I would suggest that this is behind many of the fads and movements that sweep through the evangelical world from time to time. People are trying to find a deeper experience of the Christian life—something to make their faith more current, more immediate, more experiential. And so we have the “fullness” movement, the signs and wonders movement; the Toronto blessing; the charismatic movement; the spiritual warfare movement.

Well what do we make of all of this? What does the Word of God say that we need in order to have a life that is spiritually full and satisfying?

It says that we need one thing, and one thing only—Jesus Christ is all we need. We find that in Colossians 2:6-12, and I’d invite you to turn there now. It’s on page 1233 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 emphases that Paul stresses in the passage that begins at verse 6:

1. Continue in Christ

Colossians 2:6-7 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. Don’t be captured by counterfeits

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 in addition to what we already have in Him

Colossians 2:9-10 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.

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 2:11-12 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 the Lord, and growing in Christ is an open target for the enemy.

With winter coming, sooner or later we’re going to have some ice on the roads. 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’ll make it up the hill. But as soon as you lose that forward momentum, you’re in trouble. You begin to slide back.

The Christian life is a lot like that. You can’t put yourself in “neutral” spiritually. You can’t stop and say “Well, I think I’ll just stay here for awhile.” Either you keep moving forward or you start slipping backwards. We’ve got to be “moving on to maturity” as the Bible says in Hebrews 6:1.

Now how do we continue in Christ? How do we keep moving forward spiritually? Well, we do it “just as we received him” as it says in v. 6…

“Just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in him.”

How did we receive Christ? We received Christ by faith—by simply trusting that he is the Son of God, that he died for us, and that he wants to be our Savior. So that’s how we are to continue in him. We continue in Christ just as we started in Christ—by faith.

Now when you do something by faith, it means that you’re acting on something that you know to be true, even though you may not have any visible indication at that moment that it is true.

That’s how the Bible defines faith in Hebrews 11:1…

Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.

When you get on a commercial airliner to fly somewhere, you are engaging in an act of faith. You are literally putting your life in the hands of a pilot who you probably won’t even see. Hopefully, there’s somebody in the cockpit, but you don’t know for sure if there is. And hopefully that person is competent to fly the airplane, but you don’t know that for sure, either. You haven’t examined his credentials. You haven’t looked at his pilot’s license and all his ratings. You’re doing all of this by faith.

So you take your seat in the cabin, you fasten your seatbelt, you follow the instructions of the flight attendant, and you sit back and enjoy the flight. Faith is when you act on something that you know to be true, even though you don’t have any immediate confirmation that it is true.

And that is the way we are to continue in Christ. By faith. There will be times in your spiritual life that you will doubt that you are a Christian. God will seem like he’s a million miles away. You won’t be getting constant feedback and reassurance from him. To go back to the airplane analogy—God won’t be poking his head out of the cockpit, or making announcements over the intercom just to let you know that he’s there.

So what are you going to do? Start acting as though he is NOT there?

And there are going to be times in your spiritual life when you won’t feel like continuing to move forward. You may have really failed at some point in your Christian life, and now you’re feeling discouraged. You’re wondering if the pilot and the passengers are still going to want to let you be on this airplane.

What are you going to do? Head for the exit?

You see, at times like those, we need to just keep going, by faith. Don’t give up. Walk by faith and not by sight. Keep trusting Jesus. In verse 7, Paul gives us four keys that will help us to keep moving forward, or continuing, in Christ

1. Be rooted.

We used to live out west in Colorado and when we would go out in the back country, we would often see tumbleweeds blowing across the roads. Well a lot of Christians are like tumbleweeds. They don’t have their roots down in the Word of God, so they are blown around by every wind of doctrine or teaching that comes along. They tumble into churches, and they tumble right on out of them.

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, with his roots down in the Word of God.

Be rooted in the Word. Don’t expect to be making spiritual progress if you are not spending time in the Word of God.

2. Be built up

We also used to live just outside of New York City. Whenever we had visitors, we would take them into Manhattan to shop or sightsee. And when we were in Lower Manhattan, I would usually park in the underground garage of the World Trade Center.

The twin towers of the World Trade Center are 110 stories tall. But what many people don’t realize is that the World Trade Center has a foundation that goes down about 10 storeys underground.

Now while we were living in New York, some terrorists tried to blow up the World Trade Center. They drove a delivery van into that underground garage. And in that delivery van was a huge homemade bomb. And when it exploded, it took out three of those 10 underground levels. But the towers above stood firm because the foundation was strong enough to withstand that massive explosion.

Same thing in the Christian life. If you are rooted down spiritually, then you can be built up. But the problem is that many Christians nowadays are trying to build a superstructure of good works and Christian service and Christian living on an inadequate foundation.

You’ve got to be rooted down first, then built up.

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

The Colossians learned about Jesus 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. You need to make sure that you are being strengthened in your faith through consistent Bible teaching.

4. Be overflowing with thankfulness

This is a picture of a river overflowing its banks. An overflowing, thankful, grateful spirit is one of the marks of Christian maturity.

So these are the keys to continuing in Christ:

1. be rooted

2. be built up

3. be strengthened

4. be overflowing with thankfulness

2. Don’t be captured by counterfeits:

v. 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.

The expression “takes you captive” 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. They become prisoners of war. The KJV uses the word “spoil” as in the “spoils of war”.

This is a serious warning that Paul gives us here. There are a lot of spiritual ideas circulating in our world that do not come from the Bible. Some of them sound very appealing, and look very attractive, but 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 milk chocolate! But when I took my first bite, I found to my dismay that my Easter bunny wasn’t solid—it was hollow! It was just a thin shell of chocolate enclosing nothing but air. What a disappointment!

And that’s the way these spiritual philosophies are. They promise fulfilment. They promise reality. But they are hollow and empty and contain nothing inside. They are deceptive—they look real but aren’t. They are counterfeit.

Paul says “Beware that no one takes you captive—that no one carries you off—with these kinds of 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. Some of them will present you with books and teachings 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. This is Satan’s strategy. Why would Satan want to spend his energy 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 false religions 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 Jesus 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 counterfeit. It is false teaching.

(By the way, the Bible comes with a test kit for false teaching. It’s the book of 1 John, and particularly chapter 4)

The Bible teaches us that Jesus is all we need. Because…

3. 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 Jesus, you don’t have enough. Jesus Christ is the fullness of all that God is. God didn’t hold anything of himself back to reveal 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!

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 signs and wonders—we don’t need anything more than Jesus. Because when we have a relationship with Jesus, 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 the standard 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. Oh yes, and one other thing—that baby also comes with an appetite!

Now what is the growth and development of that baby going to depend upon? Is it going to be depend on someday growing another arm or another leg or perhaps adding another brain? No, of course not—a baby already has all of the components 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 adding anything; it is a matter of nourishing what’s already there. 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.

Why is Jesus all we need?

4. Because only Jesus 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 surgery—the removal 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 sin—and by giving us a new self, which makes us alive to God and causes us to want to do his will. He gives us a “self” transplant.

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.”

If you are a Christian, you have had spiritual surgery. Dr. Jesus 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 Dr. J. can do that—this kind of operation 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 in water. The figurative meaning is “to be identified with”.

Paul uses the word in the figurative sense here. When you receive Jesus as your Savior, you immediately become united with, and identified with Jesus. So that means that whatever happened to Jesus also, in a figurative sense, happened to us. When Jesus died, we were there dying with him. When Jesus was buried, we were buried with him. When he rose from the dead, we rose with him. And now we have a new life.

“If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature…”

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 commit sins? Why am I still tempted? Why do I still fall down spiritually?”

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

My old sinful self has been removed 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 is going to teach us in Col. 3.

My sinful self is dead, but my sinful nature is still around and I 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 boss is an absolute dictator. He makes Saddam Hussein look like Mr. Rogers. This boss treats you terribly—he screams at you, bullies you, and he treats you like dirt. He orders you to do unethical, immoral things and every day at the office is just an ordeal. You feel worthless, and dirty, like a slave.

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 and defence mechanisms for coping with this horrible situation. This goes on for years, and this is the way you learn to live.

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 new boss who is kind and considerate and understanding. He treats you with dignity and respect. He treats you like a friend. What an incredible relief! A new day has dawned!

But unfortunately, you find that all those years of slavery under the old boss have left you with a lot of baggage. You have developed some work habits that are hard to break. The old slave-driver is gone, and you’ve got a wonderful new boss to work for, but the habit patterns from your old way of life 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 baggage. The old self is dead—it doesn’t have anymore authority over us. And the new self is alive, and growing. But that old nature still clings to us and trips us up.

And you cannot 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 biblical strategies for dealing with the old nature.

Review…

6. Continue in Christ

7. Don’t be captured by counterfeits

8. We’re complete in Christ

9. We’ve been circumcised by Christ

Next week…

We’re going to discover that there’s a difference between being religious and being a follower of Jesus.