Christ, Our All in All

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.

Colossians is only four chapters long.

It's an evening read.

You can read it every day, and it would 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, is 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.

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 two, 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.

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.

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 an accompaniment with those.

So we understand that the law is not something that's easily you can't just say well there's a ubiquitous or unilateral monolithic view of the law.

Throughout Christendom there have been even within Covenant Theology you have the Theonomists and the Covenanters which tend to take a harder line regarding the law of God specifically 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 that's 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 I this is kind of harkening back to what I said earlier about the lady 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 grace people who think that grace allows you to live in habitual unrepentant sin that's more 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 Gnaeo which is the idea of to be meaning the sense of being like our genetics is where we get the word Meganoita Meganoita Meganoita Meganoita 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 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 was the Scythians were a very just barbarous people like barbarians but even more so and then slave or 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 1-10 because 1-10 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 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 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 slave or 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 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 Jesus said 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 have made all foods clean and Peter says but I have never eaten anything 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 in that metaphor who is the dog the Gentile but she was the one who says yes but even the won't even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the masters table and so Jesus you know demonstrates this is an example of faith and he gives to her the desire for healing and I'm not saying in any way that Jesus was wrong please know that I would never seek to correct my Lord what I'm saying is there is 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 there were two people the Jews or the heathens the rest of the world now it's either you are saved or you are unsaved and it's still two people it's always God's people and those who are not God's people you know as what Ruth said to Naomi your God will be my God you know we are either God's people or we are 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 you know baptism we would say is a new covenant expression of entering in but even Jesus fulfilled that exactly and in doing so he becomes the 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.