Once Saved Always Saved But Not Always Safe
Colossians 2:6-9
(Children's Sheet for Sermon Interaction is at bottom. Notes are throughout sermon)Please turn to Colossians 2:2. As you are turning there, I want you to think about being in a war situation. Think about being there in the midst of a deadly battle zone. Now think about being lost in the midst of the battle. If you are not rescued, then you are going to perish. The war rages on, and a revelation comes to you, and you realize the shocking fact that you are one of the "bad guys." You realize that your country has been lying to you. It has been telling you from birth that you are a "good guy," and that the other side is the enemy. One day, your eyes are opened, and you see the truth. You understand that your country is deceived, and that everyone in it is heading for doom unless they change their course. There is a lot of bravado that keeps everyone fighting against the good guys, but you realize that in your country, you were born to die like the rest. All the propaganda of your country's creed of eating, drinking, and being merry, because tomorrow we die, is emptiness to you. You are getting sick of fighting the good guys. You know that the good guys are going to die too, but it has been revealed to you that they will be raised into super beings forever because their supreme leader was the ultimate hero who gave His life for them, and in an amazing miracle, He rose from the dead to live in them in some mystical way that you don't fully understand; but you know enough, and you believe it. In this astonishing miracle, the Great Ruler gives His people purity, peace, life, and power. In fact He is the Purity, Peace, Life, and Power. You are consumed with the thought--they serve the perfect Ruler that you only dreamed could exist; and He does exist. You want to get away from the fight, but you are lost in the the battle. You recognize, in a profound way, that you can not save yourself. You need to be rescued. You also understand that you must call upon that phenomenal leader of the good guys to save you. Everything about Him--what He is, and what He does, is good news, and so you believe it, want it, and seek it's source. It is a faith issue, and you embrace it. In an instant, the Leader of the good guys rescues you, just like He rescued all the people who are now the good guys. He rescued them from your same evil, blind, dark, futile, fighting kingdom. You embrace all these facts in surety that is solid faith in the solid truth. Now you are saved from what would have been an impending doom. You are transferred into the kingdom of good. You are overjoyed because you are really saved. Everything changes when the Great Good guy Himself changes you. Fellowship is good. Reconciliation is good. Your eternal hope is good, because you know that when you die, you will go from the earthly aspect of the Kingdom into the eternal glorious aspect of the Kingdom in your own resurrection from death. Everything is good in your salvation. All this is true, but there is a kind of problem that lingers around the earthly aspect of the Kingdom. Yes, there are problems. You are saved, but not all is quite safe yet. The problem is that propaganda from the old country keeps slipping into the camp. The Righteous Ruler told His people to beware of it. He told us to expect it. Amazingly, some of your own good guys embrace much of the propaganda. You find that you are tempted to do so yourself. Every time the good guys adopt a little bit of the lies from their old enemy nation, their minds are tainted. Some of their thoughts are captured and imprisoned to the old dark, futile, lost way of thinking all over again. Being saved, they do not leave the glorious kingdom of their life. You can never leave it, once you have been transferred there in the great rescue. Nevertheless, taint comes to the good guys from the old world all the time, and the taint manifests its infection in those who embrace it. They become ineffective warriors. They do not express the victory of their leader. They manifest defeat in their mental captivity; and what is worse is that their defeat spreads to others because they are deceived, and in their delusion, they deceive other good guys. The result is that the army gets weak, and it looks weak as it tries to fight a kingdom that has warriors that think a lot like the captured minds that have willingly been given over to them. Good guys are personally defeated over and over again, and it is all because they embraced the propaganda of the enemy that they were originally delivered from in the great reconciling rescue in the first place. Though all these things are true, all is not dismal in the Righteous Ruler's eternal kingdom of glory. No warrior acts and thinks flawlessly, but the warriors in the Kingdom of good are empowered, and have the equipment available, to fight the good fight of faith according to the culture of Christ. The Ruler calls His good guys to do this with consistency in overcoming power. Those who do, fight with the clarity of truth that dispels the darkness and exalts their king at every battle. They are stable in the facts, and so they throw off the propaganda, as they live by the Book. They live according to the riches that are in the Word Himself. This is what we all want to be. We want to be the stable ones who are effective in our walk. This is why we must recognize that though we are saved, we are not always safe. I want us to keep this in mind as we read our passage through, starting in verse 2,
"2 ... attaining to all the wealth that comes from the full assurance of understanding, resulting in a true knowledge of God's mystery, that is, Christ Himself, 3 in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. 4 I say this so that no one will delude you with persuasive argument. 5 For even though I am absent in body, nevertheless I am with you in spirit, rejoicing to see your good discipline and the stability of your faith in Christ. 6 Therefore as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, 7 having been firmly rooted and now being built up in Him and established in your [the] faith, just as you were instructed, and overflowing with gratitude. 8 See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ. 9 For in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form," Colossians 2:6-9
Let's all prepare our hearts to learn from God's word together in this sermon titled,
Once Saved Always Saved But Not Always Safe
[prayer]
There are four overarching principles that I want us to glean from our text this morning. All of them have to do with the exclusivity of Christ, our relationship to Him, and our knowledge of both.
/1/
The first principle of vital importance is that we must be grounded in Christ and His word in our lives. Paul speaks of the concern of all of us who fight for the body of Christ,
"2 ... attaining to all the wealth that comes from the full assurance of understanding, resulting in a true knowledge of God's mystery, that is, Christ Himself, 3 in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge."
@1 In _______________ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. (Colossians 2:2-3)
Christ is the treasure, and in Him is the wealth of wisdom and knowledge for us to prosper by. This is the summation of everything that Paul teaches. Paul recognizes that there is not much time to disciple these newly emerged Christians. He does not know whether he will ever see these people in this earthly life. He only has the size of a length of pressed out reeds in a papyrus scroll to write this instructional letter, so he gets right to the core:
Everything of primary importance is summed up in Christ.
Volumes of theology are summed up, simply in Christ. In Paul's focus on the creation of the body, you are in his kingdom 1:13. In Him you have redemption, the forgiveness of your sins, v. 14. You have been reconciled by the peace he made through the blood of the cross, v. 20. He is the firstborn from the dead. We follow him as second born in Him, v. 18. We are His body. He is the head, v. 18. This is how you are reconciled. It is in His fleshly body through death, in order to be present you and me and all Christians before Him alive--set apart by Him, in Him, blameless and beyond reproach v. 22. There are vast riches to this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory v. 27. In Christ are hidden all these treasures of wisdom and knowledge, and more.
"Hidden" is a mystery word concerning the core. The unsaved proto-gnostics in Colossae believed that there was special mystery knowledge necessary for false salvation. They believed that this knowledge was hidden in their secret writings. This word also means "stored," "cached," or "deposited in." Paul is saying that the wisdom our Christian minds need, is stored; deposited; cached in the living word, which is Messiah Himself. We need it like we need good food for good health. Without good food we get weak and sick. Without withdrawing the riches of Christ from the good deposit, we become impoverished and destitute among the wealth of the kingdom. Though we are saved, this is what happens when our safety deposit has gone unused. And it is happening. Many of the essential riches are falling by the wayside in our generation because of propaganda from the enemy world that captivates the minds of people in the church. A couple of weeks ago, I read to you a a recent study where half of people who claim to be Christians say that they are saved because they believe in Christ for the forgiveness of their sins. Okay, that sounds good. They confess that they believe in the core. But they also said that they believe that the sinless Christ also sinned! This is amazing when we realize that throughout history, Christians have known the most basic and essential fact that Christ was, and had to be, sinless. The reality is that there is no treasure in a sinning Christ. There is only treasure in the God-man Christ. One reason why Christians today lack spiritual wisdom is because they are not mining the real treasures of wisdom out of their Lord and Savior. Either they pick and choose what they think is important and so consequently they miss what God says is important, which is all of it; or they are blending the poison of manure in with the gold of the core. They are getting fiat money from somewhere else. Pulpits are not preaching the depths of doctrinal knowledge because pastors either don't understand it themselves, or they think that people will only get confused. This is a huge problem, because every single aspect of God's revelation to us has importance, and great value. If you don't teach that Christ is sinless, and you don't explain "why" from God's revelation, then people will think that Christ sinned. But a sinning Christ is not Christ at all. So, what this means is that people who believe that Christ sinned, do not believe in the true Christ. They believe in another core. It looks like the real thing, and it may even be called the same thing, but it is different. It has no value. You begin mining fool's gold out of a contrived Christ, and you get a contrived belief. So, this first principle is that we must be grounded in the true Christ for understanding what sin and salvation is in the first place. We are all sinners in the first Adam who is the one who sinned.
"21 He made Him who knew no sin to be sin [as a substitutionary sacrifice] on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him." 2 Corinthians 5:21
@2 Christ became _________ on behalf of all who believe in Him for salvation, so that we would become the righteousness of God in Him. (2 Corinthians)
We must be grounded in Christ for righteousness. This means we must be grounded in Him to understand the body of Christ that we are made into. In salvation, as the body, we are joint heirs in the firstborn heir. In the body, we are all connected. The true knowledge of Christ moves us to treat one another, and interact with one another, as the family of God. It means that we are different from the world, and so we must think differently. We do all this according to Christ, and the culture that is inside Him. We know that homosexuality is a sin, because we listen to the Holy Spirit from His word. We know that we can educate ourselves better than the government because we don't believe that the false god of secular government understands what is right and wrong according to Christ. We know that the world is lost in sin, and in need of a Savior because that is what God says. We know that the only prayer is prayer to God in the name of Christ for Christ's purposes to be accomplished. We do not pray for sin to be accomplished in our lives, but the world does this kind of praying every single day. Why? Because they do not pray according Christ. The culture that is inside of them, is opposed to the culture that is in Him. Every religion out there that does not embrace Christ as God and as the only way, the only truth, and the only life, is praying for sin from sin as the core. The riches are that we know that we are part of the eternal body. So accordingly, we realize that this world is not our home. We realize that there are distractions that get us focused on the temporal world and off the riches of Christ. We realize that there is a battle for our mind, and that we are to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. We recognize that the Bible is the word of God, passed down from the apostles and prophets of the foundational generation of the emerged church. We recognize that if we don't live according to God's word, then we are living according to the words of the world. Paul identifies this type of worldly wisdom, as the wisdom of men, 1 Corinthians 3:19; the wisdom of the world, 1 Corinthians 2:5; the wisdom of the flesh, 2 Corinthians 1:12, and the wisdom of self made religion Colossians 2:23. The wisdom that is in Messiah, washes away all persuasive arguments based on the wisdom of men. So this is the first principle--we must be grounded in Christ which means we must know what He has done, and what He is doing as the One Who He really is. To do this, we need to be grounded in His word in our lives. Love it. Learn it, and live it at all costs.
/2/
This leads us to consider the second principle of vital importance. If we are not grounded in these things, we can easily become deceived. Paul says,
"4 I say this so that no one will delude you with persuasive argument. 5 For even though I am absent in body, nevertheless I am with you in spirit, rejoicing to see your good discipline and the stability of your faith in Christ."
There are many voices today that are claiming to be enlightening pieces of wisdom, but it is really just foolish propaganda. They can be completely against God, Christ, and His will, but because the arguments are persuasive, we can be deluded. This means that you are not allowed to say that you have the Holy Spirit and therefor He will guide you into all truth, and so because of this, you can not be deluded. The Holy Spirit actually does guide us into all truth, and He is doing so now, but the fact that Paul warns against being deluded is enough to solidify the fact that we can fail to follow the guide. But there is also the apparent demonstration of delusion that we see occur with Christians by the multitudes which demonstrates that delusion is a very real and present danger. Maybe you have heard someone say,
"I don't need another human teaching me. God is my teacher. All I need is the Bible."
Maybe you have heard yourself say this. But the statement is not true. It is a statement of the deluded. The truth is that God's revelation from His word in Ephesians 4:11, 1 Timothy 3:2, 1 Timothy 5:17 and so many other places, clearly demonstrates that the Spirit is saying that God has placed teachers in the body, for the body, to teach the body. God also tells you and me that we need to be learners who learn from such teachers. I want us to notice what Paul said when he told Timothy to prescribe and teach the things that Paul taught him. Directly after saying this,
"Prescribe and teach these things. ... Until I come, give attention to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation and teaching." 1 Timothy 4:11, 13
@3 God wants us to give attention to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, and to _________________. (1 Timothy 4:13)
Notice that the teacher who exhorts, needs to be exhorted and taught. I am in the body, so I need God's gifted teachers. I am a pastor/teacher, and it is my gift from God. Christ gets all the glory for it. But even though I am a teacher, I need teachers and exhorters, like Timothy did. I even need teachers to help me to teach. For me to think otherwise would be odd. I always love Spurgeon on this. He was illuminating when he taught the teachers,
"It seems odd, that certain men who talk so much of what the Holy Spirit reveals to themselves, should think so little of what he has revealed to others."--CH Spurgeon
All ministers, (me included) should respect, in discernment, what the Holy Spirit has revealed to called and gifted men. We should cherish the privilege to glean from teaching ministers in the body that God has provided for our edification. The people who say,
"I don't need other Christians teaching me"
are making a declaration that is supposed to sound very pious, and spiritual. In fact, what is ironic, is that they use the Bible to back their claim. The problem is that they are wrong. It is not God's word that is wrong. They are wrong, and they are deluded. One passage these mavericks use to teach others that Christians don't need God's teachers, is 1 John 2:27. It is where John teaches the Asian church that is being inundated by a Cerinthian kind of proto-gnosticism with its secret knowledge, that
"... you have no need for anyone to teach you" 1 John 2:27
Now, if we lift this verse out of its context, and we highlight it like a banner, then it looks like we don't have a need for anyone to teach us. But when you look at the whole context, you understand that this is a protection from people in the lost world coming to teach the Christians propaganda of the lost, which actually is a problem today, and is part of the problem I am preaching about. Let's look at the context of 1 John 2:27. John says,
"26 These things I have written to you concerning those who are trying to deceive you.
[A Eureka Moment should already be happening right now for all of us, but let's go on,]
27 As for you, the anointing which you received from Him abides in you, and you have no need for anyone to teach you; but as His anointing teaches you about all things, and is true and is not a lie, and just as it has taught you, you abide in Him." 1 John 2:24-27
It is amazing that people who claim that they don't need teachers will miss this clear and evident detail of the text that should be taught. Just like Paul warned of people who would delude the Colossians, there apparently were certain people who were purposely trying to deceive the Asian churches concerning spiritual things. Unlike the spiritual deceivers that have a false anointing, John explains that God's anointing teaches us about all spiritual things, and is not a lie. Biblically called and anointed Pastors, and teachers, though not perfect, are not trying to deceive the other members of the body of Christ. If you mine the treasures of Christ, and you dig up some special nugget of truth from God's word, and you want to share it with the body, you are not setting out to deceive them are you? This is the point. We all need anointed teachers. The more I study and the more I learn, the more I experience how important this fact is. There is another passage of Scripture that is often used in the same way as the 1 John passage. I have had run-ins with spiritual mavericks who say that we don't need teachers because of Jeremiah 31:34. They say that now that Christ has come, we are living in the New Covenant with the Holy Spirit, and so there is no need for teachers. As usual with things like this, the prophecy is not quoted properly. The actual prophecy is,
"They will not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, 'Know Yahweh,'
[Again, another Eureka Moment should be hitting us, but let's continue,]
because they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them," declares Yahweh, 'for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.'" Jeremiah 31:34
Once we go to the actual passage and realize that the prophecy is concerning the teaching of something in particular, rather than the need for teaching in general, we see that it is being grossly misunderstood by those who attack teaching as a New Covenant ministry that is meant to edify the body. Notice what will not need to be taught,
"Know Yahweh"
And notice why:
"because they will all know Me."
This is a prophecy that serves a two fold purpose. First it is of the remnant out of apostate Israel recognizing that the One true God is the One true God. Because the elect remnant out of apostate Israel, will have returned back to Yahweh, there will no longer be a reason to tell a saved Jew to know who their Savior is "... because they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them," declares Yahweh, "for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more." Secondly, the eschatological fulfillment of this, of course, is in Christ the Covenant forever. The main point is that we need to be grounded in God's word, with a proper theology and proper doctrines so that we will not be deluded.
/3/
This leads to the third point. We must walk in what we know, which means we must live out what we know inside,
"6 Therefore as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, 7 having been firmly rooted and now being built up in Him and established in [the] faith, just as you were instructed, and overflowing with gratitude." Colossians 2:6
@4 God wants us to walk in Christ Jesus as the _______________ we received in salvation. (Colossians 2:6)
One of the first things that we must do as Christians is recognize that we are really saved. You must do this by leaving behind legalism that condemns and confuses. We must also do this in comparison to what the Scriptures describe as true salvation. One of the greatest proofs of this is when we find ourselves confessing that Christ is our all in all. We recognize that He is our righteousness. We recognize that He is our power. We recognize that He, in Himself, is our salvation for us. It is because we are in Him as part of His body that we are saved. We live, breathe, and walk in our Savior. But listen to me, because there is something else that is just as important: We also recognize that Christ Jesus is our Lord. Notice that this is the big starting point of what Paul is talking about here. This is Christ's state of being. He is both 100% Savior who leads us, and 100% Lord who saves us. He is not only one, or only the other. He is both. I want us to also notice that Paul does not use the designation of Christ Jesus as Savior here when He explains the way the Colossians have received Him. Paul says that when you received Christ Jesus, you received Him as the proper noun, "Lord." This is interesting because Paul does not refer to Jesus with the proper noun, "Savior" in this epistle like he does in others. The term is found no where in Colossians. Paul explains that God rescued us out of the domain of darkness and transported us into the kingdom of the King which is His Son, in 1:13. He says that Jesus is the One who reconciles us back to God in chapter 1:20-23. But Paul does not call Christ by the usual term "Savior" in Colossians. But, in the parallel epistle of Ephesians, Paul does:
"... Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the body." Ephesians 5:23
There, Paul refers to Christ as both the Head, which is a designation of His Lordship, and as the Savior. Paul says that part here in Colossians too,
"18 He is also head of the body, the church; ..." Colossians 1:18
I find this to be really fascinating in our day where people want to make some sort of a controversy out of the Lordship of Christ. But the Lordship of Christ is part of the mystery. It is treasure in Him. Remember, Paul has never seen the Colossians. He is discipling them by letter, and he does not speak to them in terms of receiving Jesus Christ as their own personal Savior. He speaks to them as already, in the past tense, receiving Jesus Christ as Lord. To get what Paul means, I think it is important to understand that Lord means Master. Paul is talking about Lordship salvation. It is Master salvation, where He makes you His slave in a wonderful rescue out of the slavery of the domain of darkness. This is how Paul received Christ on the road to Damascus. When confronted by the resurrected Jesus, Paul asked, by the Spirit;
"8 'Who are You, Lord?" Acts 22:8
Paul explained that Jesus already understood His own Lordship,
"And He said to me, 'I am Jesus ...'" Acts 22:10
Then Paul asked,
"What shall I do, Lord?" Acts 22:10
Paul's conversion experience displays the pattern of the reality. So what is Paul's point here in our text? I think it is clear: Since you are saved in surety and steadfastness, you should be submitting your whole being to your Master in your walk in Him in daily obedience with the same surety and steadfastness of faith that you had when you received Him as the Master in the first place. Paul magnifies his point with three metaphors to drive the theme home:
"6 Therefore as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, 7 having been firmly rooted and now being built up in Him and established in [the] faith, just as you were instructed, and overflowing with gratitude."
Your firm rooting, and my firm rooting, is so important. It is where we are established in Christ spiritually, and you are established according to proper instruction. The place of rooting is in Him as Lord. Once we get rooted in the fact that Christ is the Master who saves us, and the Savior Who is our Master, then to act surprised or complacent about walking in Him in obedience demonstrates that there is something wrong with how and what we were supposedly planted. Somehow we have bought into the propaganda, and our mind has been captivated. We have become deluded. Since we are rooted, though, in receiving Christ as the Lord, our walk everywhere should reflect this fact; where the specific treasure that we mine out of the Lord directs us with the culture that is in Him. Being firmly rooted and built up in Him as the Lord--the Head--guides us theologically; it guides in our decisions at work; in our families. It guides us politically, socially. It guides us in giving to meet needs. Firm rooting in what it means to have Christ as Lord, guides us to treat our spouses and our children, and our parents, in the way that pleases the Master. With Christ as our Lord, we submit to the law of the New Covenant Kingdom by manifesting the Spirit out of us, which is to love one another the way Christ loves us.
Paul also says that we are to be being built up in our Lord in all these things, which means we are to be growing in them. Growth is the term for the body. Being built up is the term for the temple. The Greek word for "being built up" is an architectural word, which speaks of continual construction. Our bodies are the Lord's temple of the Holy Spirit. To walk in Christ as Lord, is to walk in the Spirit, where we are manifesting the Spirit filled life. It is where the temples look more like the heavenly glory of the resurrected Christ, than we look like the deadness of the world. This affects our prayer, sanctification from sin, our witness, our fellowship in the body with the body as a committed part of the body, and on, and on. Walking in Christ is our life.
First rooting, then building, and finally the last metaphor that Christ uses for walking in Christ is according to being established in "the" faith just as you were instructed. The New American Standard translated "ho pistis" from the Greek here into "your faith." Maybe they were trying to relate it back to verse, 5, where Paul first mentions your faith. Whatever reason, the article used here is "the," as the ESV, rightly has it, "the faith." It is not the possessive pronoun, "humon" used in verse 5, for "your faith." Paul is talking about the same "the faith" of 1:23; which makes sense, because the term, "the faith" means the doctrines, and precepts of the sphere of Christianity. Paul is showing that God's sovereign work has established us in the subject of the mystery of Christianity with the fullness of riches being Christ in you, the hope of glory, which is the Lord in you that you are to walk in right now, in respect to obedience and love. Again, it has to do with proper doctrine, because Paul basis this not on some nebulous catch all phrase where we simply say that the Spirit is leading us, and so whatever we think is right, must be right. Paul says that our establishment in the faith is according to accurate, necessary, comprehensive, instruction in the doctrines and precepts of Christianity. The bottom line on this point where we must walk in what we know, which means we must live out what we know inside, is not that practice makes perfect. Rather, practice keeps the perfect Christ that is in you, coming out of you in your walk. All of this brings safety from delusion, but the question is:
Are we completely safe?
/4/
No, we are not safe, which leads to the fourth and final principle: We must do more than be on guard; we must actively see to it that no one persuades us with deception. This means that we must implement defensive, and offensive battle action, because, though we are once saved always saved, we are not always safe. Paul says,
"8 See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ. 9 For in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form,"
When Paul says see to it that no one takes you captive, he is saying that there is a responsibility that goes with Christianity that blends with all our responsibilities as Christians. Seeing to it, means we are to be diligently in a battle mode to fight off kidnappers of the mind. Philosophy is the speculative thinking that seeks to figure out what things mean, and then presents the answers as the truth. The traditions of men, would be the way people have believed about things for as long as anyone can remember. The elementary principles of the world find their origin in the realm and sphere of the unsaved. False teachers were like fire ants all over Colossae, as false teachers are in our the culture around us. They are everywhere and because they are loud, we can not afford to act like we are neutral. You do, and you will get stung over and over again. So, we must be on the defensive, which means we must be on the offensive. We need to sting first with the truth and protect ourselves with the shelter of truth. We must fight the deception with the truth, and we must take every thought captive to the obedience of the Lord. It is real good against the real evil that comes at us every day. The entertainment from the lost world culture, in music, movies, games, and internet venues, dictates world views and agendas that are completely opposed to the riches of Christ. Seminaries have professors who teach Bible students to doubt the Bible, or to doubt God, or to doubt clear teachings from the Bible. It is relentless, and it keeps chipping, and chipping at the stability of Christians. Just like the Fabian society's idea that gradually influencing free societies to become socialist eventually leads to legalized plunder and slavery on people, in the same way, worldly philosophies influencing the church with man's idea of successful Christianity leads to legalized plunder of the spiritual mind, and slavery for people who are starving for the truth. Any time we move from Christ-centeredness based on what our Lord says in His word, on over to what the man-centered culture of lostness is doing, then we have given ourselves over to captivity. Captivity comes in the form of contrived doctrines that are taught and preached simply to make people happy, or bring money into the church. The church is deluged with this stuff. The captivity takes the shape of teaching that avoids difficult biblical doctrines. Defenseless, and offense-less teachers don't want to do it. Defenseless, and offense-less learners don't want to hear it. But the problem is that captivity is easy. It feels good at first. Sin is fun for a season, but when the season is over, you are enslaved to a form of Christianity that has a hard time recognizing God's treasures in Christ, and why they are important. When we live in an age where the trend in churches is for Pastors to avoid difficult doctrines because we don't want to bore people; or we don't want to offend people; or we don't want to apply the mental energy to work through difficult passages and doctrines; or, we don't believe what we are teaching anyway, then we are planting seeds of total unpreparedness for the future crop of the next church generation. It is a shame that more energy is put into how to create a mental and emotional mood on Sunday morning, than making sure that the teaching is rich. What is rich teaching? It is simply teaching that is contextually and exegetically sound from the full counsel of God concerning all the riches from the core. Paul is saying, you and I need to be careful. We are once saved always saved, but not yet safe. Notice how Paul stays with the core issue. He's talking about seductive concepts
"rather than according to Christ." Colossians 2:8
The answer seems simple doesn't it?:
Believe and teach everything that Christ believes and teaches.
But first we must recognize the real and present danger. We must recognize that we are in a spiritual war. It is a war for the truth. It is a battle for your mind. Always remember:
Your doctrine will drive your actions, and your doctrine is in your mind. Once your mind is captive, then your captor will drive your actions.
There are two tactics in our battle. Our first tactic is an offensive attack maneuver. Paul's last words to Timothy are the marching orders for every man of God in every generation,
"1 I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Messiah Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by His appearing and His kingdom: 2 preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction. 3 [Why? Because] the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires," 2 Timothy 4:1-3.
@5 We must be careful to endure in _______________ doctrine, instead of wanting to have our ears tickled, and so we accumulate for ourselves teachers in accordance with our own desires. (Colossians 2:6)
This is a proactive advance that attacks the captivators who teach according to people's desires instead of the desires of the Lord. Peter gives us the defensive tactic that we must employ,
"separate Christ as Lord, [Master] in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and reverence;" 1 Peter 3:15.
The same Lordship connection to abiding in the full counsel of God is consistent. When Peter says make a defense, he is speaking about the strategy of giving a reason for what, and why, you believe. The word Peter uses for "defense" in Greek, is apologia. It is where we get the word "apologetics." We need to be ready to make a defense to everyone who asks us to give an account for the hope that is in us, and the only way we can do this is by being equipped with the full counsel of God. We need to be ready in season and out of season; to reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction. Part of our Christianity, then, is that we need to see to it that no one takes us captive. We have the strategies for the offensive battle position, and the defensive battle position. Finally, Paul says that we are not to be captivated to that which is not in accordance with Christ Who is God. Christ is 100% Savior. Christ is 100% Lord. Christ is 100% man. Christ is 100% God. This is the identity of the core of who we serve according to the foundation of truth.
I urge you to be in the constant realization that we are all once saved, but we are not always safe. Remember the first principle: We must be grounded in Christ, and His word, in our lives. This is closely connected to the second principle to always be aware of: If we are not grounded in these things, we can easily become deceived. This is connected to the third principle: We must walk in what we know, which means we must live out what we know inside. It is not that practice makes perfect. It is that practice keeps the perfect Christ that is in you, coming out of you in your walk. Finally I urge you to remember the fourth principle that ties it all together: You and I must do more than be on guard. We must actively see to it that no one persuades us with deception by being in combat mode of defensive, and offensive battle action, because, though we are once saved always saved, we are not always safe. amen
@1 In _______________ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. (Colossians 2:2-3)
@2 Christ became _________ on behalf of all who believe in Him for salvation, so that we would become the righteousness of God in Him. (2 Corinthians)
@3 God wants us to give attention to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, and to _________________. (1 Timothy 4:13)
@4 God wants us to walk in Christ Jesus as the _______________ we received in salvation. (Colossians 2:6)
@5 We must be careful to endure in _______________ doctrine, instead of wanting to have our ears tickled, and so we accumulate for ourselves teachers in accordance with our own desires. (Colossians 2:6)
