Sermon Tone Analysis
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Introduction
Every Christian knows that God has standards, whether they want to acknowledge this or fight to suppress it.
In fact, according to Paul in Romans 1, every human being knows God and that God has standards, because God has revealed this truth to everyone.
The Bible clearly teaches us that we are saved by grace through the means of faith, and not by works.
But how does grace and God’s standards of conduct work if salvation is a free gift?
This has caused much discussion among Christians.
Most would agree that justification is indeed by grace through faith.
Salvation is a free gift.
But there is a division over how one is sanctified to where their lives will become more like God’s standards.
Some are afraid that the preaching of grace interferes with the necessity of being restored fully in the image of a holy God.
Some of Paul’s opponents in Romans 6 put it this way: “Should we continue to sin in order that grace will abound?”
Paul answers this with an emphatic No!
So then, are we saved by grace, and then sanctified by good works?
Is it as though God by His grace erased the slate of sins against us and allows us to start over again, this time doing things right.
Does this work?
John Wesley tried this approach, yet after many years of constant preaching, he could only point to a few who were perfectly sanctified.
And he wasn’t one of them!
One could question whether any of Wesley’s followers actually achieved total sanctification despite their strenuous efforts to do so.
Many, many others gave up in despair trying.
Is there a better way than the way of sanctification which Wesley tried?
I think there is, and it is found in the Book of Colossians.
Please turn your Bibles to Colossians 2:20 and follow along.
Exposition of the Text
We don’t know whether Paul actually visited the city of Colossae in person or not.
No such visit is actually mentioned in the Book of Acts, but Ephesus was nearby.
Paul spent three years there, and taking trips to nearby cities is certainly possible.
There were a lot of similarities between Ephesus and Colossae as can be seen in the similarities between the letters.
Some would also say that Ephesians was a circular letter sent to all of the churches in the region.
We know that Ephesus had a large Jewish population including those who had emigrated from Alexandria, Egypt, such as Apollos.
The Judaism of Alexandria was a mixture of both Jewish and Greek ideas.
A man named Philo tried to translate the meaning of the historic Jewish faith into Greek meanings by the use of allegory.
This resulted in what was a form of Gnosticism, or was at least one of its roots.
Allegory in a sense made the history of the events in the Bible of secondary importance.
Adam, Eve, Moses, and other figures were reduced to symbols.
Whether these people actually existed or not was not important.
Scripture was reduced to useful moralistic and carefully crafted “myths”.
The church at Colossae had been infected by these views.
The same allegory which reduced the historicity of the Old Testament could be used to make the historicity of the historical Jesus.
Paul in the introduction does admit that Christ is bigger than history, but firmly grounds Jesus Christ within the historical realm.
The Son who existed before time and history was a real man who died for us and our sins.
It is this cosmic Christ who created the universe and actually holds it together.
This must be balanced against the historical Jesus.
Both needed to be affirmed.
A group of teachers in the church at Colossae who were interested in this mystical theology had troubled the church.
They seemed to be Jewish also, as they apparently held to legalistic teaching of conduct.
The Greek philosophers saw life in the body as evil.
Their idea of eternal life was to escape the body and be reunited with the spirit of the cosmos.
They expressed their understanding of this by either indulging the flesh because what they did in the body was irrelevant.
The other way was to punish the body through manmade rules.
The latter through Jewish influences seemed to be dominant in Colossae.
So starting in Colossians 2:20, we see a human attempt of sanctification based upon the contempt of the body.
They had rules such as “Do not taste”, “Do not touch”, and “Do not handle”.
This may have involved food restrictions, but it seems that what is being said here was abstinence from sexual relations.
Paul lets them know that these commands were entirely of human origin.
They were men’s rules for sanctification, and they were based upon a non-biblical understanding of the world.
If they had understood the Bible as a historical document, they would have seen that God said “It is good” after every act of creation and twice after the creation of humans.
God also ordained and blessed marriage.
So any standard of human origin which conflicts with those of God is plainly wrong, no matter how sophisticated they seemed.
Paul treated the standards they had made as pure rubbish.
Rather than curbing the indulgence of they flesh, they in fact promoted them.
We see an example in all of the fad diets which are designed to lose weight.
In the end, most of those who try them gain weight.
Why did they pay millions to Jared who lost several hundred pounds and maintained the loss on a Subway diet if it was something easy to do?
Instead of the worship of their own willpower over the flesh with a rise in self-esteem, these people end up with less self-esteem in the end.
The very promise that these rules offered actually left them worse off than before they started.
We should learn then that human attempts at sanctification are doomed to fail.
This is what the bible says.
The argument of those who rail against free grace because it allegedly promotes indulgence, and try to make standards of conduct to improve Christian conduct are actually promoting the very thin they hate the most.
In 3:1, Paul shows that there is a different way.
The Bible way of sanctification is based upon the will of God and not of man.
Paul tells that because we were raised from the dead in Christ’s resurrection that we shout set our gaze into heaven where Jesus is seated at the right hand of God.
The fact that Jesus is seated and not standing is proof that His priestly work has been finished and perfected by His death and resurrection.
There were no seats for the priests on the Old Testament as their work was never finished.
And if we base our sanctification upon manmade rules, this is a denial of what Christ has done in our behalf.
The Greek shows this as being a once and for all event.
The “if” which appears in too many translations is very misleading and should be translated “since”.
Using “if” could introduce doubt as to whether Christ was raised at all, or whether we were raised with Him, both of which are heretical.
A Christian, by definition has been raised in Christ’s resurrection.
This is an accomplished fact.
To set one’s mind upon the finished work of Christ of which we are reminded when we remember that Christ is seated at the right hand of God is to take ones gaze off that of the world.
Rules and standards remind us of boundaries of separation.
To look in the other direction is to look towards Christ.
There is no boundary which separates us now from Christ.
We can boldly come to God and the throne of grace to find help in time of need, as Paul reminds us in Hebrews.
Cows like lush green grass rather than hay.
We too like the better things of life.
When a cow sees a fence, she sees something else.
The fence separates the field she is in from outside.
In one sense, she feels the security of being protected from predators by the fence.
But there is something else she notices.
On the other side of the barbed wire is grass that is tall and lush because it hasn’t been grazed.
This is an irresistible lure for her.
She gets to the barbed wire and figures how she can turn her head through the strands of the barbwire to graze on the grass.
Most of her is still on the safe of the fence, but her head is on the other side.
A problem occurs when she tries to get her head out.
She tries to pull it straight out and forgets how to turn her head.
Now the very danger she sought to avoid is all too apparent.
By having her head stuck in the fence, she is immobile and a sitting duck to predators.
Unless the farmer sees and comes to her aid, she could well perish there.
She is then dependent upon the grace and care of the farmer to be saved.
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