Christ, Our All in All

Colossians 3 and 4: Christ as the Believer’s Sufficiency

This morning we're going to be in Colossians chapter 3. Actually 3 and 4, because this is my last week teaching for a while. And next week Mr. Bradley Lee is going to be taking over for me. So I am going to do a whirlwind to get us through.

But I thought about it last night as I was kind of collecting my thoughts and been thinking about it for a while, because I knew I wasn't going to be able to do a verse-by-verse to the end of Colossians.

What I want to show you though is how the remainder of the book sort of sustains the theme that we have already seen was begun in the first two chapters. So Colossians is only four chapters long. It's an evening read.

You can read it every day. And it will only be a few minutes each day of reading. In fact, that's how a lot of people really study some of the smaller books. They'll take and they'll read the book every day for a month.

And you'll be surprised how much you are able to retain if you can discipline yourself to read and focus through just one portion of Scripture. And making it consistent and you'll remember it so much better.

But like I said, today we are going to be looking at Colossians chapter 3. If you want to open your Bibles, I'm going to point out the specific passages we are going to address toward the end here. And like I said, this has just been an overview.

But the two verses we are going to look at primarily today is chapter 3 verse 11 and chapter 3 verse 17. So if you are taking notes of any kind or if you do underline your Bible, if that's a habit that you have or a practice that you do, those are the two that are going to be the focus of today.

Verses 11 and verse 17. However, we don't want to read a text without a context. And so I want to read all of chapter 3. It is relatively short. And then go back and address why those two verses tend to stick out to me in regard to the overall meaning of the book itself.

In chapter 3 verse 1 it says,. If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.

For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. Put to death, therefore, what is earthly in you, sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.

On account of these, the wrath of God is coming. In these, you too once walked when you were living in them, but now you must put them all away. Anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.

Here there is not Greek or Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free. But Christ is all and in all. Put on, then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other as the Lord has forgiven you.

So you also must forgive, and above all these, put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body.

And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him.

And then it goes on to talk about the wives. Wives, submit unto your husbands as is fitting to the Lord. Husbands, love your wives, and do not be harsh with them. Children, obey your parents. Let's meditate on that for just a moment, shall we?

In everything for this pleases the Lord. Fathers, do not provoke your children lest they become discouraged. Slaves, obey in everything those who are your earthly masters, not by way of eye service as people-pleasers, but with sincerity of heart, fearing the Lord.

Whatever you do, work heartily as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ, for the wrongdoer will be paid back for the wrong he has done.

And there is no partiality. Can we pray? Father, I thank you for your word and I thank you for this particular section of Scripture which reminds us of the supremacy and the sufficiency of Christ. And Lord, as we examine the focal aspect of this book of Colossians, which is that very truth, that Christ is all in all.

He is all we need. And everything we do ought to be in service to Him. I pray that you would first of all humble me, forgive me, Lord, of my shortcomings, my sins, my failures, my trespasses. And I pray that you would prepare my heart now to teach.

And I pray ultimately, Lord, that your Holy Spirit would be the teacher and that you would keep me out of the way and keep me from error. And I pray, Lord, for your people that they would hear your word and that they would be instructed by it and be moved to a closer walk with you.

In Christ's name, amen. So, last week, if you'll remember, those of you who were here, I think everyone was here, we talked about the fact that in Colossians chapter 2, the Apostle Paul makes an address regarding the subject of the law.

Specifically, he says, in no uncertain terms, that no one should pass judgment on us or that we should not allow anyone to pass judgment on us in questions of food and drink or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath.

And as we discussed, there are different ways that people have understood that. Historically, the church has understood that to mean that we are not bound by the festivals or the ceremonial laws of Israel.

And we talked about this last week. If you go to covenant theology, covenant theology breaks the law of God down into three distinct parts that they would argue are not outlined in Scripture but are part of necessary inference.

That there are moral laws, that there are ceremonial laws, and that there are civil laws, and that those laws that are ceremonial and civil had their place, one, being fulfilled in Christ, the ceremonial laws, the civil laws having their place in the theocratic nation of Israel, but that the moral law of God is underpinning everything and sustains and is never abrogated.

Where a civil law may give way to a new government or a new form of governing, and a ceremonial law will find its fulfillment in Christ, the moral law of God remains in force in the sense that it's still wrong to murder even if you're in Christ.

You've probably all seen the picture online of the lady who's smiling at the police officer who's trying to write her a ticket and she goes, but officer, I'm not under law, I'm under grace, in an attempt to get out of a parking ticket or whatever.

So we understand that there is a moral component to the law which is sustained throughout. At least that's the view of covenant theology. New covenant theology agrees in a sense but would say that even the moral laws of the old covenant are not the standard of the church or the new covenant, that the new covenant standard is found in the new covenant, that the new covenant has its own law and is itself given by the new lawgiver.

Jesus is the new Moses. According to new covenant theology, Jesus takes the place not only of Aaron as priest, but of Moses as lawgiver, and so he gives us a new law. And then we could argue whether or not Jesus' law is different than the old covenant, which I would say it's not different, but it is certainly more expansive than the old covenant in regard to the law of the heart.

So that would be the view of new covenant. Dispensational theology makes a hard line between Israel and the church. Don't really want to get into all that that entails, but it does make a distinction between how they see the law and how they understand the role of the law in the church.

Torah observant would argue that all of the laws, moral, civil, and ceremonial, still apply to all believers today, and anyone who seeks to be a true follower of Christ will also be a follower of the Torah.

They will seek to observe the feasts, the dietary restrictions, the Sabbaths, and all that is in accompaniment with those. So we understand that the law is not something that's easily... You can't just say, well, there's an ubiquitous or unilateral monolithic view of the law.

Throughout Christendom, even within covenant theology, you have the theonomists and the covenanters, which tend to take a harder line regarding the law of God, specifically in regard to theonomists, specifically in regard to civil law, believing that all civil law should be governed by the civil law that God gave to Moses.

That's the perfect governing law. And so even today, there should be that foundation of civil law in our land. So there's a lot that can be discussed here about these four things. But my goal today, again, because of the shortness of time, is to simply say that one of the most dangerous, and it's not even up here, but one of the most dangerous views of the law that I have found is, and it's rampant in the church, is the view which is normally called antinomian.

Antinomian is a perspective which means nomos is law. So antinomian means to be without law, to be opposed to law. And this is kind of harkening back to what I said earlier about the lady. She says, I'm no longer under law, I'm under grace.

And that has become such a problem because people have begun to take the grace of God as license to live in sin. I hate it when somebody says, and I've probably said it before too, people say, well, people think grace lets you live however you want to live.

Well, that's true in a sense because grace should make you want to live differently. So in that sense, what I think the issue is not that grace allows you to live any way you want to live. I think the issue is people who think that grace allows you to live in habitual, unrepentant sin.

It's not just however you want to live because I hope that I want to live for Christ and thus I would be living as I want to live. As the Bible says, delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.

That doesn't mean that if you seek to please the Lord, He's going to give you every single thing you've ever wanted. What it's talking about is your desires will change. Your desires will be desires for Him and He will fill those desires in Him.

So when we see someone saying, and I've told this story before, I don't know how many of you have heard it, but there was a young man who was a roommate of another man that I knew and he was always studying the Bible, always watching TBN, which is not a great place to go to study the Bible, but he was always filling himself with some type of Christian talk or something, talk radio and all.

And yet he would get online and he would search for women that he could have interludes with, just illicit affairs, and he would go out and as he was leaving the house, he would say, I'm going to go sin so that grace can abound.

And he would, in a sense, mock God. But in his twisted view, the more I sin, the more I experience grace. And it's the exact opposite because the Apostle Paul says, should we continue in sin so that grace should abound?

And the answer is meganoita, which is the emphatic sense of the word no. And meganoita actually comes from the root of geneo, which is the idea of to be, meaning the sense of being, like our genetics is where we get the word, huh?

No, it's may is the first and genoito is the root.

No, no, no.

Genoito being the sense of being, like we get the word genes and things like that in genetics. And the idea is may it not ever exist. May that thinking not exist in the mind of a believer. So the Apostle Paul here has just addressed the subject of not being judged for not keeping the feast, not being judged for not keeping the Sabbath or whatever.

However, in chapter 3, he demonstrates to us that even though that is true, we are not a lawless people. And we do have a moral standard by which we live and which we are so expected to live that we could just be disciplined in the church for abandoning it.

And again, I go back, why am I focusing on verse 11? He says, here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised, uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, which the Scythians were a very, just barbarous people. You know, like barbarians, but even more so.

And then slaver free, but Christ is all in all. Rather, he is all and in all. And the point of verse 11 is taking into account verses 1 through 10, because 1 through 10 says, if you are in Christ, you've died to self.

If you are in Christ, this life is no longer the life that you were living before you died to Christ. Because before you died to Christ, you were living for self. Before you died to Christ, you were living for the pleasures of this world.

And yet now, you're living for Christ. So, it's not about being a Jew or a Gentile anymore. It's not about, and with that, I would argue that he's saying, it's not about the external adherence to the feasts or the dietary restrictions or the Sabbaths.

It's not about this Jewishness, this thing that makes people understand their distinction as Jew. It's not about being Jew and Greek. And it's not either about being slaver free or barbarian or Scythian, but it's about Christ.

Remember what we said, the focus of Colossians is the sufficiency of Christ? And so, he's saying, you have to understand, just because you've come to Christ, does not mean that you are given over to sin.

In fact, quite the opposite. If you've come to Christ, you've died to sin, and now you're living for Christ. And living for Christ does come with a certain moral component. But understand this, that that moral component isn't bound up in the feasts or the Sabbaths or anything else, or your Jewishness or your Gentileness or your barbarianness or any of these other things.

It's bound up in Christ. What is the law of the believer? It is Christ. He is the standard bearer. He is the perfect law keeper. Now, I don't know if I mentioned this last week. I think I mentioned it on Wednesday night.

We had a lady who left our church a while back, several years ago actually. And she left because she said she wanted to worship like Jesus worshipped. And what she meant was she wanted to worship on the Sabbath.

She went to a church that kept a Saturday Sabbath. And she went to a church that was very specific to keeping the dietary restrictions and the feasts and things. Very similar to our observant. It's called the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

I mentioned it, I think, last Sunday. And when she left, that part really stuck in my mind. If Jesus did it this way, then I want to do it this way. And you have to at least appreciate the logic in that.

I mean, I don't discount for a second her sincerity. I think she wanted to do what Jesus would have her do. And she thought Jesus would do as I do. And what I said earlier about Jesus being the standard bearer.

You might come to think, well that's what I mean as well. But Jesus being the standard bearer in this regard doesn't mean that we are taking on the Jewish nature of Jesus' life. We understand that Jesus kept the whole law because Jesus was under the covenant of Moses.

Jesus lived under that covenant. And he lived under the reality that all of the law of God that was given to Moses applied to him. And yet there were still times, as in Mark, where it was said of what Jesus said that he made all foods clean.

Jesus made all foods clean. And thus there's a new understanding of diet. We get to Acts chapter 10 and we see the Apostle Peter told, I've made all foods clean. And Peter says, but I have never eaten any, nothing unclean has ever entered my mouth.

And yet God says to him through the vision, what I have made clean do not call unclean. And we know the extension of that was not just food. But the extension of that reality was Gentiles. Because up until that point, the Jewish people saw the Gentiles as dogs.

Even Jesus himself said, when the Gentile woman came and asked for healing for her daughter, what did Jesus say? Who would take food, well that's what she said, but he said who would take food from a child and give it to the dog?

So in that metaphor, who is the dog? The Gentile. But she was the one who says yes, but won't even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master's table? And so Jesus demonstrates, this is an example of faith and he gives to her the desire for healing.

And I'm not saying in any way Jesus was wrong. Please know that I would never seek to correct my Lord. What I'm saying is there's a reality in which up until the time of Acts, where there was a hard and fast separation between Jews and Gentiles.

And the hard and fast separation was that Jews considered themselves to be clean, and they considered the world to be unclean. We are God's children, you are the dogs.

Before that there were two people, the Jews or the heathens, the rest of the world.

That's right.

And now afterwards, now it's either you're saved or you're unsaved.

And it's still two people. It's always God's people and those who are not God's people. As what Ruth said to Naomi, your God will be my God. So we're either God's people or we're not God's people. And it was that way for the Old Covenant, it's that way in the New Covenant.

But the distinction is that in the New Covenant, you don't enter in by the external right. You enter in by Christ who fulfilled all the external rights on your behalf. It's interesting, the subject sometimes of baptism comes up.

And when Jesus was asked by John the Baptist, you should be baptizing me, why am I baptizing you? And what did Jesus say? This must be done to fulfill all righteousness. Jesus did everything that was required for righteousness, even something that wasn't necessarily an Old Covenant thing.

Baptism, we would say, is a New Covenant expression of entering in. But even Jesus fulfilled that. Exactly, exactly. And in doing so, he becomes the one through whom we enter into glory. When I stand before the Lord, I will stand before the Lord not with the righteousness of my own, but I'll have the righteousness of Christ.

If I don't have the righteousness of Christ, no matter how much good I have done, I will be lost. I watched an interview, it was an old probably 20-year-old interview with Dr. MacArthur on Larry King.

And Larry King, for some reason, liked to have John MacArthur on. And he had him on several, several times. And to Larry King's credit, he would always let him say what he, let him say what was, but he always had other people on.

But he never cut MacArthur off that I noticed. I've seen a lot of the interviews. He always allowed him, and MacArthur would give the gospel there. But in this particular sense, a lady calls him to the show.

And she says, I know that you have to receive Jesus to be saved, and those who do not receive Jesus will not be saved. Jesus is necessary for salvation. This lady on the phone. And Larry King responds, he says, no matter how much good they've done.

And the lady said, no, because no amount of good that you've done. This lady, whoever she was, she certainly had a southern accent and certainly sounded very, you know, she wasn't super articulate. But she was saying what was correct.

And she was saying, no, no, no amount of good that you could do is going to earn your place in heaven. And you just sort of see MacArthur just sort of nodding. And so Larry King turns his attention to MacArthur and says, is that correct?

Is that the Christian view, you know, John? And he said, she is correct. He says, she has explained it in the true way, that Jesus Christ. And then the lady next to him who represented something. I don't know if she was representing another brand of Christianity or some other position.

She said, so you're telling me that a person, and I'm being a little exaggerated, but she was somewhat indignant. You're telling me that a person who spends their whole life working with ailing children or loving children, blah, blah, blah, that when they die, if they don't believe in Jesus, if they're a Jew, that they're going to hell.

And the other guy, there's always three or four, there's another guy who, I don't know who he was, but he looked like he may have been maybe Indian, like from India. And he goes, no, we're all going to hell.

He thinks we're all going to hell. And so MacArthur, you know, in his standard position, he said, look. He said, Christ is the only way. He is the only, your good works cannot save you. And that, I think, is the key to all of this.

If we don't find our sufficiency in Christ, if we try to find sufficiency in anything else, the keeping of the... Now, if you want to keep the feasts, you know, we have the Passover meal here at church as a reminder of what God did in the Passover and hot points to Christ, and we do that every year.

You want to do that?

You want to have the feast of booths and set up tents outside your house and do that? I think you have every liberty in Christ to do that. If you want to worship on Saturday, I do think you have liberty in Christ to do that.

And I think certain Christians exercise that liberty.

But you can't bind it.

But I don't think that you can bind it, and I agree. That's right, Mike. I think that where it is is in binding. But what can we bind? I think there's an outline here, at least in a sense. We bind those things which are of the flesh.

And if you go back again up to verse 5, you put to death, therefore, what is earthly in you. Put to death what is earthly in you. And he gives a list, you know. He says sexual morality, impurity, passion.

And you might say, well, does that mean all passion? I could say I'm passionate for ministry. No, it's talking about passion of the flesh. It's earthly passion. It's followed up with a sense of evil desire, covetousness.

And it's interesting, he says, which is idolatry. I don't know if you ever thought about that. If you look at the Ten Commandments, how closely knit they are together, because it talks about idolatry at the beginning.

It talks about coveting at the end. They're both, you know, idolatry is covetousness does here. I heard a guy argue the other day that all of the Ten Commandments can be brought down to number eight. That all of the Ten Commandments are, because the Eighth Commandment is thou shall not steal.

And if you think about all the other commandments, what is it when you don't worship the Lord your God, you're stealing the worship that he deserves? What is it when you worship another god? When you're stealing from God his supremacy and uniqueness?

When you're stealing somebody's spouse, when you murder, you're stealing somebody's life. When you covet, you're thinking about stealing what they have. You know, all of it kind of boils down. I thought it was an interesting view.

But it is so interesting how knit the moral law of God is. There is such a fine understanding of what is that which is pleasing to God and what is not pleasing to God. And so I see in this list, like I said, and I love verse 7, it says, in these two you once walked when you were living in them.

Every one of us could say, yeah, one time I was an idolater. You know, and those who are old enough and mature enough to say, you know, they've lusted, you say, I'm an adulterer. Or, you know, all of these things are examples of what we have done.

And yet, we don't find our sufficiency in not doing them anymore. And that always worries me when I meet somebody that says, you know, I talk to them about their faith. Well, I used to be a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And now, I don't do that anymore. And I say, that's what it means to be a Christian? Is that you just stop doing bad stuff? In general, we just replace some bad with other bad.

Somebody once said that just about every decision you ever make in life comes down to one of three things. Either involves sex, power, or money. And sometimes all three. And there's a lot of wisdom in that from the earthly perspective of it.

It just shows that we're constantly tempted, constantly in the flesh, constantly thinking of self all the time. And that's why, like I say, we must stay in the Word and stay with Christ because otherwise, we're doomed.

I mean, that's just it.

And that's key too. Because when we start thinking, well, maybe I am saved because I don't do these things anymore. But again, what about the sins that are going on in your brain? What about the things that you're thinking about or dreaming about?

So, we know as believers that we have certain expectations laid upon us. But we also know that none of those expectations earn our salvation. So, how do we understand the expectations? Why would I expect that you, Mike, would be a faithful husband?

But my reason for being able to expect that out of you is because you said because you claim to be a Christian. Because Christ has commanded us to love our wives. And that's basically what you just said.

But if I said, Mike, are you saved because you're faithful to your wife? You'd know that that's not it. And therein lies that great distinction. Can you be a good Jew and be a good Christian? Well, I think a person can be a Jew who is converted to Christ and still feel an attachment to their Jewish foundations, such as those in the book of Acts.

There were people that the Apostle Paul converted, and then he had Timothy circumcised. Why? Because he didn't want to offend those who were still very much attached to that. And I think when you go to Romans 14, and you see where the Apostle Paul talks about the fact that there are some who eat meat and there are some who don't, and we should all be right before God.

So there's a sense in which there are all these things that we can do that are part of our conscience, but that doesn't make them what saves us. But yet, on the other hand, if I saw a man who was constantly being adulterous or constantly being abusive or constantly abandoning his fidelity to the church or to his wife or to whatever, why would I say, that man's probably not a Christian?

Or could I say that? Could I say that? You think so? I mean, you think it's right to say that?

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think it does come back to the reality of the standard that Jesus gave us. Jesus said that if there's a person who is in sin, and we go to them and we seek their repentance and they refuse to repent, and then we go to them with multiple parties so as to demonstrate the reality of the weight of their sin, and also the witness that it's not me who's wrong, but it is, in fact, you who's wrong, and the person continues in their unrepentance, what did Jesus say?

Treat them like a... It's always interesting, because he doesn't say, put them out of the church. He says, treat them as if they were a Pharisee, or rather, no, a publican. Treat them as a sinner. And in that context, that was a person who was outside of the fellowship.

And so we are given a standard in the New Testament, you could say a standard of law. But the standard of law isn't based on the ceremonies or even the civil duties of the Old Covenant. The standard of law is based on the morality of the believer.

So as I mentioned last week, there are questions, and I don't really have time to flesh all this out, but I want to just run through this ending part. There are a lot of questions that come up, what are moral things?

For instance, I mentioned tattoos last week. Some people think tattoos are an absolute moral thing. Other people think tattoos are an immoral thing. Some people think tattoos are an amoral thing. You understand, there's three categories.

There's immoral, which means it's wrong. There's moral, which means it's right. And amoral, which means it isn't right or wrong. It doesn't have a moral component. And I'm not going to ask you all to give me your opinion, because that could lead to a whole other set of conversations.

But the issue becomes, you can see how that small thing, think of something like this, think of something even more, somebody who takes a sip of alcohol. Now we know getting drunk is not sinful. But there are some people who believe, and with all their heart, that even the drop of alcohol ingested is sinful.

And so that becomes an issue of conversation. But some people make it law. And that's where this really is more difficult, I think, than we realize at times. Because, for instance, I'm the pastor. Let's say you might come to me and say, I saw Brother Lee.

Not that you would do this. But I saw Brother Lee drinking a Bacardi.

And then what I...

I drive past it.

Actually, we have a man here who works at Bacardi. We have a man. My dad worked for Anheuser-Busch 37 years.

Graduated. He didn't graduate from Anheuser-Busch.

I graduated from Anheuser-Busch.

He retired from Anheuser-Busch.

And there were some people, you know, who took issue that he would even work there. In the old South, tobacco was the industry that sustained many of the farms, and yet many of the preachers would preach against tobacco.

But they were getting paid.

But yet some would also smoke from the post.

Well, yeah, yeah.

So it's just an interesting thing. And I'm certainly not saying all law is subjective. But what I am saying, and I've said this from the beginning, I do believe there's a transcendent moral law of God that we all understand.

Because nobody debates the merits of murder. Nobody debates the merits... Well, okay. I stand corrected. There are some who debate the merits of murder when we argue on the subject of abortion. But even then, in general, it's getting more brazen now.

But in general, those who would support abortion would say, well, it's not really murder. I disagree 100 with them. But you understand, even they would say, they wouldn't want to come out and say, well, murder is right.

Even though recently it seems to be that they're willing to say that. But there is a transcendent moral law. And this is what gets me to verse, and I don't have a lot of time to flesh this out, but this gets me to verse 17.

Because I think this is the heart of all of this. Because it says, and whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to the Father through Him. I believe that ultimately, in similar to what Spurgeon said, he said, you know, today I'm going to go home and smoke a cigar to the glory of God.

I believe that we have to run everything through the filter of does this glorify our Lord. And so verse 17, whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus. Can I sit down and sin against my wife and say I'm doing this to the glory of God?

No.

Now, somebody may be twisted like that guy who walked out, I'm going to go sin so that grace can abound. That's twisted thinking, and we know it is. But ultimately, I think the great filter is can I do this to the glory of God?

Can this glorify God? And when I'm sinning against Him, and I'm injuring another or I'm injuring myself or I'm injuring His name, I am not doing this to His glory. Now, will He be glorified in the end?

Yeah, in His judgment. God's glorified in all things because He glorifies Himself through His sovereign decree. But I can't say that personally I'm living to the glory of God if I'm living in a way that's displeasing my Lord.