Keeping the Cross at the Center-July 28, 2013
Colossians 2:6-15
Paul reminds the believers in Colossae and us just as we received Christ as Lord we should continue to live for Him. How do we live for Him? By being rooted and built up, strengthened and overflowing in thanksgiving. It is these things that are Paul’s focus reminding the people to not just receive Christ as Savior but to live for Him as Lord. To live for Christ is impossible without God working in us and through us by His power. For this living to stand the test of time, outside influences, and internal struggles we must continue to be rooted, built up, strengthened, and overflowing with thanksgiving.
Paul instructs the believers to let no one take you captive by this world’s hollow and deceptive philosophy. What are those philosophies? That the material world is all bad, that Christ is not God, that things like greed, pride, selfishness, beauty, and the objectification of people are ok. These are the type things that leave us empty no matter how much we try to choke down they will never truly satisfy us. Dr. Gardener C. Taylor one spoke in an interview about the need to keep the cross of Christ central in preaching. He then used an analogy of children eating sweets saying that if you keep feeding children sweets they will keep coming back and eating them, but soon there will be a price. The price is that these sweet do not nourish or give strength they only weaken the child, and prolonged eating of sweets will root their teeth making it impossible to eat the real food that does provide the strength needed. Too often we have settled for the easy sweet stuff of this world or watered down Christianity that never lives up to the fluff, it doesn’t fill us up or sustain us, and eventually will make it next to impossible to receive true nourishment.
Contrasted with the hollowness of this world is the fullness of the deity that lives in Christ. The fullness of God dwells in Christ and now we have been given fullness in Christ. Nothing else will complete you or satisfy you like Christ. The great news is you don’t have to feel empty, alone, afraid, worrying that we don’t measure up to someone’s standards. The answer is you don’t and I don’t either, we can be full and complete in Christ. We don’t have to keep eating what the world is feeding, and that is truly a great freedom found in Christ.
It is in Christ that we have put off the sinful nature, 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. It was God’s power, not my effort, that both raised Christ and saves us from our sins and for His purposes in the world today. The power of resurrection lives in us and we do not have to feel empty, but rather filled with Christ.
When we were dead in sin, God made us alive with Christ in forgiving our sins, it cancelled the written codes power over out lives because the laws of this world have no power over those who are dead. He took it all away, nailing it to the cross. The power of the written codes were to regulate life, and in death they have no power or dominion. Christ took the punishment with Him to the cross. In doing so Christ was disarming the powers and authorities and making these so-called power a public spectacle. They thought this public death of a man who claimed to be God that they would set an example to any who would dare call Jesus Lord rather than Caesar. Christ instead makes a public spectacle of them by removing their “supposed” power by triumphing over them by the cross. The victory was made greater when the first believers saw the resurrected Christ. Their supposed victory was ours through the power of the cross.
We have talked about Christ and His divinity and now about receiving Jesus, living in His fullness, and giving thanks to God for saving us. We need to remember to keep the cross as the center because in His cross there is victory in heaven and for daily living. Living out of our relationship to Christ, an appropriating of what God has already accomplished in Christ. This puts the emphasis where it belongs in Christian living-not on human willpower or effort but on God’s grace-wand enables such living to be characterized by thankfulness.
Just as we have received Christ Jesus as Lord let us continue to live for Him, being root, built up, strengthened, and overflowing in thanksgiving. For this the freedom and power of the cross for both our salvation and our daily living.
The Bowtie Pastor 