Kerri’s Blog

The big idea in Colossians is the preeminence of Christ over all and the sufficiency of the work of the cross. Everything that we need is in HIM.
The culture of Colossae was ideologically very similar to the days we live in now. They took a little bit of every religion and mixed things together to create something that was palatable to them. It seems to me that the audience Paul is addressing shows the tendency to do what we all tend to do to an extent, and that is to try to add something to their faith to enhance it – to follow the trend or the next big thing.

What started as the Colossians’ sincere love and devotion to Christ became unfulfilling and so they started to add things to it. They added strict dietary requirements, and special rituals and prayers. They added reported encounters with the forces of the spiritual world. They added extreme asceticism and legalism. They believed, and taught others, that doing and experiencing these things would bring them into a deeper fullness of spirituality and oneness with God. A by-product of this belief system was the creation of a spiritual “elite,” and a spirit of self-righteousness.

Of course at the root of these practices was faulty doctrine (understanding) of God and Christ. Faulty doctrine leads to faulty living. In the case of the Gnostics (the group influencing the Colossian church), it went beyond just ignorance to heresy. I have to ask myself what actually made the Colossians vulnerable to this melting pot of beliefs and come to make their own religion. We really don’t know. But one big piece of the puzzle, at least to me, is that they were just down the road from Laodicea and Ephesus. Maybe you remember the Laodiceans from the book of Revelation. They were the ones who God called “lukewarm,” and of whom He said, “I will spit you out of my mouth (Rev. 3:16).” The church at Ephesus planted the church at Colossae. In Revelation 2:1-7, God said to Ephesus that they had left their first love – the sincere love for Christ that lifts Him above everything. In spite of their zeal and good works, He held that against them.

I think that maybe the church at Colossae was a hybrid of these two things: lazy in their faith and bored with Jesus. They had to add other things to the work of the cross to keep their interest (That’s a very simple way to put it, but as far as I can see those are the big ideas of those two letters in Revelation). When we loose our passion for Jesus, we become cold in heart and our love for Him grows cold. When that happens, most of us will not just walk away from church and the relationships and activities we have there. We just keep doing the things we do by routine. Those things that we are doing become the measure of our spirituality, rather than Christ-likeness and passion for Him.

What a fine line! Passion and love for Jesus will lead us to do good works. Actually, our works prove that our faith is sincere (James 2:14-20). Without works, we have a lazy, lukewarm, self-sufficient and self-centered faith, like the Laodiceans (Revelation 3:14-18). On the other hand, if our love of holiness, the church, good works, social justice, preaching, conferences, or any other thing becomes our focus more than Jesus, then we are off track and in the boat with the Ephesians. We have “lost our first love.” Both passion for the cause of Christ and for Christ Himself have to dwell together in our hearts in abundant measure to bring us to maturity in Him.

In his letter to the Colossians, Paul is striving to bring the Colossians back full circle to the purity of the gospel, the sufficiency of the cross, and the absolute authority of Jesus Christ. What I hear Paul saying in this letter is, “look, guys, quit seeking the next big experience, the deeper revelation, and the magic bullet formulas to make life work out the way you think it should. Everything you need is found in Christ. He IS the experience. He IS the full revelation of God. He IS the answer to the mysteries of both this life and the next. Knowing Him is all you need to know.”