Four
Keys to Walking in Christ
This
is the core section of this epistle, and as Paul is addressing this
congregation on Colosse—a congregation made up of people who aren’t very
much different than you and I, especially in terms of their thinking and the culture
out of which they came—the focus is on a warning not to be sucked into
the attractive, seductive, persuasive philosophies of this world that are
presented in a very convincing manner.
Paul
draws a conclusion in Colossians 2:6 NASB “Therefore as you have
received Christ Jesus the Lord, {so} walk in Him.” It is said that the most
significant, central part of this whole epistle are the verses 6-15 and that
that is the heart of Colossians. As he states this it sort of compresses all
that he wants to say in the subsequent chapters about our spiritual life. The
main command in verse 6 is to “walk in Him,” but it is built on an analogy with
how we receive Christ. So the two questions we need to answer to understand
this are, first of all, how did we receive Christ? And the second question is,
how do we walk in Him? The answer we have looked at is that we receive Christ
by believing the gospel message, believing that Jesus Christ died for our sins.
We begin our Christian life by faith in Christ and it continues by also having
faith in Christ, trusting in Him. Paul uses the phrase here that we “walk in
Him.” This is something that is done step by step; it is not something that is
done all at once; it is a moment by moment dependency upon God.
Positional
truth is an abstract phrase that a lot of people are not clear about. It is
simply the truth that Scripture teaches regarding our position in Christ: that
at the instant we put our faith in Christ, the Bible teaches that God the Holy
Spirit is used by Jesus to identify us with His death, burial and resurrection,
and by doing so we are so closely identified and united to Jesus that we are
said to be “in Him.” This is the essence of our position; we are identified
with Christ by the baptism by means of God the Holy Spirit.
Then
there is our day-to-day experience, the temporal reality, our day-to-day
dependence upon God. This is expressed by a number of different phrases in
Scripture. This is where we “walk in the light,” or if we are disobedient and
sinful we are outside and are “walking in darkness.” The former is often
described by the phrases “being filled by the Spirit” or “walking by the
Spirit.”
The
instant we are saved we are in Christ. That is a legal, eternal position that
we have that never changes. We begin by being filled by the Spirit but the
instant we sin we are out of fellowship and in carnality. We can either walk by
the Spirit or walk by the sin nature (flesh).
What
does it mean to be “in Christ”? What does the Scripture teach about this? We
see that this is a crucial term and concept in Scripture because the apostle
Paul uses the phrase 164 times. It is somewhat unique to Paul. In the Gospel of
John, John talks about being “in Me” and “abiding in Me.” The way John uses the
term and Jesus uses the term in those contexts isn’t the same as the way Paul
uses “in Christ.” When Jesus said “abiding in Me,” that not just a legal
positional reality, it had to do with experience. So John uses that in a
different way. But for Paul this is the key term for describing the believer’s
position in Christ.
What
is interesting about this is that this is one of the key theological terms or
ideas that was honed and refined by a man who lived near the beginning and
middle of the 19th century by the name of John Nelson Darby. Darby
was originally ordained as an Anglican. He went to Ireland where he had a
ministry where he became impoverished and became quite ill. During the time
that he was convalescing he was forced to spend a lot of time in the Word. When
he did that he saw the solutions to a lot of things that had been troubling
him. One of the things he came to understand was what we usually think of when
we think of Darby, and that is dispensationalism. While Darby is well known for
his emphasis on dispensationalism and his systematic organization of those
doctrines. He did not originate these doctrines but he organized and
systematized an understanding of dispensations that clarified in a way that
never before had been clarified. He did the same thing for this whole idea of
positional truth and being in Christ. So an emphasis on positional truth and
the riches that we have in Christ became characteristic of the Plymouth
Brethren movement. So there was that focus on doctrines related to positional
truth, especially an emphasis on the study of books like Ephesians and
Colossians because both of these epistles also emphasize this
doctrine—the riches that the believer has in Christ and how we are to
live on the basis of those riches and come to understand that we have a
spiritual bank account that has unlimited funds in it, and most of us are
living like we are bouncing checks. We need to learn to live in light of the
fact that we have an unlimited bank account and not one that has only two or
three pennies in it. Darby was responsible for bringing this to the foreground
and emphasizing it.
In
dispensationalism we recognize that there are certain things that are common
and unchanging throughout all of the dispensations. For example, we believe
that salvation is by faith alone in Christ alone. Today we know who Jesus
Christ is but in the Old Testament they did not know whom Christ the Messiah
would be. So in the Old Testament there was simply faith in the promise of God
that He would provide a solution to sin and that this would come through the
Messiah. But once Jesus came and presented Himself as the Messiah, and had all
of the credentials that demonstrated that He was the fulfillment of these Old
Testament prophecies, that He was the Messiah, then once He went to the cross
as the ultimate fulfillment of all of the sacrifices pictured in the Old
Testament, we no longer look forward to God’s provision the savior but back to
a provision of the savior, specifically Jesus of Nazareth. So we see that one
thing that continues throughout the ages is that salvation is by faith alone in
the Messiah—anticipated in the Old Testament; fulfilled in the New
Testament by the Lord Jesus Christ.
In
the Old Testament the emphasis was on Israel, the physical descendants of
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and God worked in and through the nation of Israel,
but in the New Testament God has temporarily set aside Israel and He focuses on
a new people of God called the church, comprised of Jew and Gentile—all
those who have put their faith in Jesus Christ. The church universal is also
referred to as the body of Christ, and it is composed of all of those since the
day of Pentecost in AD 33 who have
put their faith alone in Christ alone. In the Old Testament only a few in Israel ever had any kind of relationship
with God the Holy Spirit. In the Old Testament the Holy Spirit imbued only a
few people in Israel, those who were associated with leadership of Israel. At
no time did the Holy Spirit empower individual believers of any kind in
relation to their spiritual life or spiritual growth. But in the New Testament
this completely changed. Every single believer from the moment of faith in
Christ has a unique relationship with God the Holy Spirit that is for only
church age believers. Tribulation saints will not have any ministry of the Holy
Spirit in this sense. Then in the millennial kingdom it is enhanced for Israel
in other ways in relation to the New covenant.
In
the church age one of the unique things that we have in relation to the Holy
Spirit is the baptism by means of the Holy Spirit. God the Son uses God the
Holy Spirit to cleanse the believer positionally at salvation and which is
accomplished by identifying us with Christ’s death, burial and resurrection on
the cross, and then we are united with Jesus Christ in a unique way that
happens at no other time in history. Paul emphasizes this. The phrase “in
Christ” emphasizes our new identity. We are placed into Christ; it is related
to our adoption within the royal family of God; we have a new identity, a new
position; we have a new inheritance—Paul says that we are heirs of God.
And so we have this new relationship because we are united with Christ. There
is a unity that we have with our Lord Jesus Christ that is not something that
we experience but is nevertheless more real than anything that we can ever
experience, and it is unique to this church age.
We
are to live in light of this and we see this emphasis that Paul has here in
Colossians. For example in 2:3, speaking of Jesus as he concluded the
introduction he said: “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” Getting
knowledge and wisdom in Greco-Roman culture at that time had something to do
with the mystery religions and having some sort of mystical experience with the
deity in some kind of ecstatic experience. There was always this kind of
special secret knowledge that the initiate had to go through before they could
advance to the secrets of knowledge and wisdom. But what Paul says here is that
in Christ we have access to all knowledge and wisdom because it is His thinking
that is the origin of all knowledge and wisdom, and only by being in relation
to Him do we have access to real wisdom and knowledge.
In verse 7 he says that we are
rooted and built up in Him. This is foundational to our being able to walk in
Christ. In verse 10 Paul says we are complete in Him. Nothing was left out,
Christ is sufficient, we have been given everything. In Ephesians 1:3 Paul
says, NASB “Blessed {be} the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly {places} in
Christ.” Peter in 2 Peter 1:3 says, NASB “seeing that His divine
power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through
the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence.” It is
complete; we don’t have to have an additional experience. There is no second
work of grace, there is no getting some sort of secret to the Christian life
that now we have more than we had before; it is all given to the believer at
the instant of salvation by virtue of the fact that we are “in Him.” Then in
Colossians 2:11 NASB “and in Him you were also circumcised with a
circumcision made without hands, in the removal of the body of the flesh by the
circumcision of Christ.” The spiritual significance of this is that is
signifies the removal of the flesh, the removal of the sin nature, the
positional and absolute cleansing that we have in Christ so that all sin has
been taken care of and sin isn’t an issue anymore. The issue is growing in
Jesus Christ. We still sin, and the solution to temporal cleansing or ongoing
cleansing is 1 John 1:9, confessing our sin, but it is grounded on this
positional reality that we have been legally declared righteous and just because
we possess the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ. So all of this is part of
who we are and what we have in Jesus Christ.
Colossians 2:7 is going to begin to
explain how we can walk in Christ. There are so many different metaphors or ways
in which the walking metaphor is used—walking in truth, walking by means
of love, walking by means of God the Holy Spirit—and each of those
passages gives us more information and other ways in which the apostles
describe how we do this. Right here we are focusing on what the apostle Paul
says: NASB “having been firmly rooted {and now} being built up in
Him and established in your faith, just as you were instructed, {and}
overflowing with gratitude.” As we read that in the English the words “rooted,
built up, established, and abounding” are words that are a little bit
ambiguous. They are translated that way intentionally because there is a
certain amount of ambiguity in any language that is left up to the hearer, the
listener, the reader to understand. We all do that naturally, and we pick up on
these shades of meaning, these nuances. Typically whenever we are having a
conversation with anybody or reading a book it doesn’t really need to be broken
down and spelled out to us. But if we are reading and working with a foreign
language sometimes we don’t always pick up on these kinds of nuances because
they are not necessarily based on pure objective rules of grammar, they have to
do with how we understand the conversation, the topic, all of the body language,
things that go into communication.
One of these areas where we do have
a certain amount of ambiguity in Greek has to do with the participle. A
participle usually ends with “ing.” We have one participle translated with
“ing” here and that is “abounding,” but all four of these words are
participles. A participle can be used one of two ways. The English kind of
messes things up here because “rooted, built up” and “established” are all
translated in English by past tense verbs. They look like they are all finite
verbs and they are not. These four participles all say something. They are
called adverbial participles because they modify the main verb; they tell us
something about how to walk in Christ. Therefore we have to properly understand
these participles.
The first participle here is the
Greek verb rhizoo, which means
simply to root something. So if you are planting you know the importance of
something being rooted, that that is the foundation. Once something is rooted
it has come to life, it is that which happens one time in the life of a plant.
So in this sentence here this verb is expressed in a perfect tense participle.
That is what is important in understanding the syntax here, it is a perfect
middle participle but the important part is that it is a perfect tense. A
perfect tense always describes the completed action, something that has
happened in the past and is over with. When a perfect tense is used it is
either emphasizing the fact that it was done in the past and the action is
completed, with ongoing results, or it is emphasizing the present results of a
past completed action. Here Paul is really emphasizing the present results. We
are “rooted”; if we are a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ it happened when we
trusted in Him as our savior. We were “rooted” spiritually, one time, when we
were identified with Christ and placed in union with Him. It is a one-time
thing that is completed, and Paul is talking about realizing now what we have
and what took place at salvation—we were rooted in Him. It can’t change;
it can’t be destroyed.
The next participle changes a little
bit and we get a hint of this in Ephesians 3:17 where Paul says, NASB
“so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; {and} that you, being
rooted and grounded in love.” Here, too, both of the words “rooted” and
“grounded” are perfect tense participles. And they are synonymous. The word
there for being grounded is from a verb that means to lay a foundation, to it
shifts from an agricultural metaphor to a construction metaphor. So these are
two different ways of talking about the same thing: a one-time event that
happened in Christ. That is over with. Now we have to live on the basis of that
and so Paul is saying, “Walk in Christ because you have already been rooted,” or
“walk in Christ because you are now rooted.” It almost brings in this causal
idea. We can walk in Christ for this reason, we have already been rooted.
But then the next word “built up”
that shifts from an agricultural to a construction metaphor is the Greek word epoikodomeo, a word that indicates
construction. Sometimes it is translated “edification” and it has to do with
building or building something up. You start construction at the base and you
move up, and it has to do when applied to the Christian life with the fact that
we are building something spiritually in our soul, one thing at a time. It is a
metaphor for the fact that we are growing up or maturing as a Christian. This
is a present participle. A perfect participle emphasizes completed action but a
present participle emphasizes action that is taking place at the same time as
the main verb—it is called contemporaneous action. So if “walk” is
present tense then we walk by being built up. Walking and building up happen
together at the same time. It is based on the fact that there is a prior
foundation laid that is said here to be “rooted.” Because we have already been
rooted and are now being built up, being edified, being mature. The next word,
“and being established,” is also a present middle participle. So it happens at
the same time as the main verb to “walk.”
These participles—built up,
established and abounding—are participles of means. In other words, this
tells us how we are to walk. We walk by being built up. We walk by being
established or confirmed in something. The word bibaioo
[bibaiow] has to do with being established
or confirmed in something, establishing something on solid ground. Once again,
it takes us back to that metaphor where you lay a sound foundation, which is
Jesus Christ, when we trust in Him, and then we build on that with our
spiritual life. It is done one floor at a time, bit by bit, piece by piece as
we grow and mature day by day, and it is something where the more we do it the
more stable we become on that foundation.
Along with this is the fourth
participle (the third present tense participle) “abounding in gratitude” or
“overflowing in gratitude.” So something that goes along with spiritual growth
is an increase on our appreciation for all that God has done for us in our
gratitude. How important it is to express that thankfulness, to have the
mentality of gratitude to God, being thankful for all that He has done for us,
given us, provided for us, they way in which we can trust in Him and rely upon
Him no matter what the circumstances might be. And notice it is “in your
faith.” Faith here is not talking about the act of believing but when it is
used in this way it is talking about what we believe. We are grounded in “the
faith” which is a term that expresses all that we should believe as Christians.
It is “the faith in Christ”; it is the sum total of what the Bible teaches
about God and who He is and who Jesus Christ is. We don’t just bring that in
the simple message of the gospel, this is an ongoing process. We never get to
the time in this life when we know everything there is to know about the faith.
So that is no excuse for thinking somehow I have arrived and I can make it for
the rest of my life, I know enough about the Word. We constantly have to learn
and grow in terms of what the Bible teaches.
We want to close with the question
we started with recently: How does your spiritual life grow? How is your
spiritual life growing? How does it progress? How are you in terms of being
built up? How are you in terms of being established or confirmed in the faith?
How much have you learned about the faith? How well do you know the Scriptures?
How well do you understand all of the doctrines that are taught in the
Scriptures?
In anything we do in life the first
thing we have to do is learn a lot of facts. Has anybody here memorized all of
the Bible yet? We don’t know enough facts! We have a lot of facts to learn just
knowing the Scriptures. Then we have to understand what all of that means in
terms of doctrine and teaching. We are a long way from that. Then we have to
apply what we have learned that we should apply. And we are a long way from
that. So none of us has any excuse to say that well, I’m just too busy in life
to put a focus on my spiritual life. What the Scripture says is, because you
are what you are as a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, because you and I are
in Christ, we are members of the family of God, members of the body of Christ,
we are united with Him in ways that go beyond anything we can possibly imagine,
the priority for us is to maximize the potential that we have because of this
unity in Christ.
Two secondary questions: a) Is the
growth of your spiritual life a priority? Many of us are very busy, but that
doesn’t mean we don’t have time for our spiritual life. If we don’t have time
for our spiritual life we really don’t have time for anything else. When all is
said in done that is what informs and strengthens everything else in life. What
does a strong spiritual life look like? What should that look like? What are
the characteristics of the strong spiritual life? One characteristic is our
prayer life, because our prayer life is our communication with God. Prayer
should be a consistent reality in our life. Secondly, there should be Bible
reading. Then we have memorization. Then there is the priority of Bible
study—not just coming to Bible class but taking notes, reading them,
reading the corollary verses. All of that is part of the foundation for our
spiritual life. The spiritual life is built on knowledge of the Word. It isn’t
just knowledge of the Word but you can’t get to the application if you don’t
first know it.
b) What is your gratitude barometer?
How really thankful are you to God for everything in your life on a day-to-day
basis? Our gratitude barometer tells us how grace oriented we are. Grace is
God’s unmerited favor, and that word “grace” is etymologically related to
gratitude. Gratitude is the response to grace. If we are not grateful for what
God has graciously given us then what easily slips in is the idea: Well, God
has given it to me but I’m pretty deserving.
We need to be grateful, not only for
the good things but also for the tough things in life because they just give us
an opportunity to trust in Him.