A message on the change Christ accomplishes
“11 In him you were also circumcised, in the putting off of the sinful nature, not with a circumcision done by the hands of men but with the circumcision done by Christ, 12 having been buried with him in baptism and raised with him through your faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead.
13 When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, 14 having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross. 15 And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.”
Beverly is in her late sixties and she’s tired. She’s tired of trying. When Beverly was in her twenties, she wanted to change the world. Now she’s tired. When he was in her forties, she tried to make one difference in her surroundings every day. Now, she’s tired. Lately she’s just been trying to change herself. Beverly doubts if she’s made one meaningful change in any of it. Now Beverly is tired. She’s tired of trying to change anything or anyone. Beverly just wants someone else to make it right.
Well, that’s what this morning’s passage is all about—someone else making it all right. If you find yourself feeing like Beverly, this passage is like a warm blanket on a cold day. This passage is all about what God does. This is about the God who works for those who wait for Him, to borrow a phrase from Isaiah. This is, ‘I heard the Savior say, “your strength indeed is small; child of weakness, watch and pray, find in me your all in all.” Jesus paid it all. All to him I owe; sin had left a crimson stain, he washed it white as snow,’ to borrow from a hymn. Find in Christ your all in all. That’s what Beverly needs to do. That’s what I need to do. That’s what you need to do. That’s what this passage is about and so that’s the claim of this sermon: find in Christ your all in all.
We will study this in three points. First: changed in Christ. Second: a cancelled record. Third: disarming the powers. In verses 11-13, we see that we are changed in Christ. In verse 14, we see that our record has been cancelled. In verse 15, we see that the dark powers of this world have been disarmed.
First: changed in Christ. Last week we learned that continuing in Christ leads to fullness while being taken captive by what is hollow and empty leaves us hollow and empty. This week we see how Christ offers this fullness. He offers it by changing us. We don’t make this happen. He did and he does; you see that in verse 11, “In him you were also circumcised, in the putting off of the sinful nature, not with a circumcision done by the hands of men but with the circumcision done by Christ.”
Circumcision was about a change. It was a mark put on the body to show that a man belonged to God, but the mark was never meant to be merely external. It was a reminder that the heart needed to be changed. “Circumcise… your heart, and don’t be stubborn,” as Moses told Israel. In this verse Paul is talking about this inner circumcision. He is talking about being changed from the inside. He is talking about “putting off the sinful nature,” as verse 11 puts it.
You can think of this as soul surgery. Circumcision was bodily surgery. Jesus does soul surgery. The medical waste that is left over from this soul surgery is our sinful nature. This doesn’t mean that we never sin. It means that sin is no longer in charge of us. That’s a massive difference. There is a massive difference between a woman who is ruled by jealousy and a woman who repents after realizing he has fallen into jealousy. There is a massive difference between a man who is ruled by pride and a man who repents after realizing he has fallen into pride.
The man who is ruled by sin can’t change. He can’t change because sin is on the throne of his heart and this sin won’t allow him to change. He is literally ruled by sin. Anyone ruled by sin—and that’s all of us by nature—needs help from the outside. We must have our hearts circumcised by Christ, which is what this change is all about.
Jesus made this change, this soul circumcision, in people through his death and resurrection. The soul surgery is accomplished by, “having been buried with him in baptism and raised with him through your faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead” as verse 12 puts it.
Jesus identified with us by becoming human and dying for our sin so that we could identify with him in his cross and his resurrection. Think of this soul surgery in terms of a parasite. Picture your sinful nature as a gruesome parasite inside you which has come to control of you. It is running and will run your life until you die. Like most parasites when you die, it will die. Jesus saw your plight and did experimental surgery on you. He joined his own body with yours so that if he dies, you die, and your parasite dies too. That’s the cross. Jesus dies. You die. Your parasite dies. So now the parasite is dead, and Jesus comes back to life, and since your body is joined to his in this experimental surgery, you come back to life too—parasite free.
Paul connects this with baptism. Baptism is about identifying with Jesus’ death and resurrection. Buried with him. Raised with him. It’s a picture of our joining. It’s a picture of how we are changed. You see circumcision language in verse 11 and baptism language in verse 12. Calvin thinks that’s you’ve got both because circumcision was the mark of the old covenant and baptism is the mark of the new covenant. Baptism is a mark of being changed on the inside by what Jesus did—you are baptized into his death and resurrection. This is how what seems unchangeable is changed. “Lord, now indeed I find thy power and thine alone can change the leper’s spots and melt the heart of stone. Jesus paid it all, all to him I owe. Sin had left a crimson stain, he washed it white as snow.”
This is all about being changed by what Jesus did—not by what you did or anything you could do. Paul told the Colossians this because they were trying to add something to Jesus to change themselves. Paul was reminding them that it wasn’t them who changed themselves in the first place. Paul was warning them about how foolish it would be to trust anything other than Jesus because it was Jesus who changed them in the first place.
It is Jesus who can change Beverly. She can’t change herself and she knows it. Jesus can change her. He can continue to change her. She can’t do it. He must. What’s required from her is faith, and that’s all she can offer. What’s required from you is faith, and that’s all you can offer; that’s verse 12’s, “through your faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead.” Faith is what it takes. “For nothing good have I whereby your grace to claim; I’ll wash my garments white in the blood of Calvary’s lamb. Jesus paid it all, all to him I owe. Sin had left a crimson stain, he washed it white as snow.”
So that’s change thought of in terms of soul surgery, circumcision, and baptism. Now we think about this change in terms of a cancelled record; that’s our second point: a cancelled record.
This point is all about forgiveness and you can’t talk about forgiveness without talking about guilt. We only need forgiveness if we are guilty, and if we are guilty, we need forgiveness. Since we are sinners, we are guilty. We are guilty of specific sins. None of us are sinners in general. We are sinners who sin specific sins. We speak in unwholesome ways. We judge others uncharitably. We despise. We flatter for gain. We trust in wealth rather than in God. We are ungrateful. We are the sort of people who do these sorts of sins. That’s part of what Paul was saying to the Romans when he said, “for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”
We are guilty of sins. God forgives sins; verse 13, “He forgave us all our sins having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us.” Paul pictures these sins as coming with a citation just like speeding comes with a citation. It is a written document explaining what you did wrong. It is a record of your violation of the law. Paul pictures each of these citations complied in a log book that God keeps. John does the same in the book of Revelation. John saw the final judgment and all the dead, “great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened.” Those books include each person’s record of violations. It’s quite a logbook. Think of your own life.
Here Paul pictures forgiveness as God cancelling these citations. God, the judge, decides to no longer hold your guilt against you. He gets rid of your record. Now, it’s possible that some of us might have grown so used to forgiveness that this fact no longer amazes us. That’s a precarious place. It’s a way of thinking that assumes, “of course God will forgive me. He’s in the forgiving business.” It imagines that God sees us as so lovable that He can’t help but forgive us. It’s a way of thinking that doesn’t have any basis in Scripture. Scripture’s view is echoed by John Newton, “Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.” To receive grace is to be surprised by grace. To have grace is amazed by grace. To receive grace from God is to wonder how God could ever be so merciful to someone who has done what you’ve done and who does what you do.
The answer to the question, “how could God be so merciful to someone who has done what I’ve done and does what I do?” is the cross; verse 14, “He took it away, nailing it to the cross.” God nailed your citations to the cross. He left them there. He visited the consequences for your sin upon His Son. “Jesus paid it all, all to Him I owe; sin had left a crimson stain, he washed it white as snow.”
We can’t change this record of sin. Nothing you or I could do would take one of those sins away. If you got caught up in gossip, you got caught up in gossip. If you got drunk, you got drunk. If you had an abortion, you had an abortion. If you gave in to lust, you gave in to lust. Trying to reframe it as something else isn’t going to change what happened. You can’t change what you did, but Jesus can change what happens about it as a result. He took your record on himself. He suffered the consequence for what you did. God gives him the punishment for our lack of trust, for our dishonesty, for our profound lack of love. “The wages of sin is death.” The message of the cross doesn’t deny that. It just tells you that there is a substitute in death.
If you claim that substitute, your citations are cancelled. God no longer considers those sins when He deals with you daily. As Spurgeon put it, “If Jesus became… our substitute… it is an inevitable consequence that we cannot suffer punishment, and that the sin laid upon [him] cannot now be laid upon us. If our debt was paid, it was paid, and there is an end of it; a second payment cannot be demanded.”
Beverly isn’t able to change herself in such a way that she becomes upright before God. The only way she can even seem upright to herself is to sear her own conscience, and that’s not a wise way to go. She needs to decide if she’s tired enough of trying to change to trust someone else to do it. She needs to decide if she’s ready to listen to Jesus and obey him who said, “come to me all you who are weary and heavy burdened, and I will give you rest.”
We’ve thought about this change in terms of soul surgery, circumcision, and baptism. We’ve thought about it in terms of a cancelled record. Now we think about it in terms of dark forces. That’s our final point: disarming the powers.
We live in an incredibly secular culture. We who grew up in it have no idea how secular and strange it is. I have no idea how secular and strange it is. We as a culture give little meaningful attention to anything beyond what is touched, seen, heard, smelled, and tasted. We think that this physical universe is a fact and that anything beyond it is mere opinion. That’s our age.
That makes matters like angels, demons, heaven, hell, and the afterlife—everything we studied about a year ago—difficult for us to understand. When it comes to such matters, each of us is like a fish trying to grasp the basics of rock climbing. We are like a bird trying to figure out what the feel of a pinball machine is like. We’ve got absolutely no context for understanding. The Biblical authors didn’t suffer from these shortcomings. These were quite aware of the spiritual realm. Paul was able to talk about guilt and grace and then talk about the demonic without missing a beat; we see that in verse 15, “And having disarmed the powers and authorities, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.”
Paul pictures our salvation from the demonic in military terms. He imagines general Jesus disarming the demons of their weapons, liberating us from their power, and then leading them to their death in a parade; that’s what’s going on with, “having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them.”
Roman military parades were called triumphal processions. The victorious Roman general would take the disarmed enemy soldiers and lead them captive back to the Roman empire. He would parade them through the city so the Roman population could jeer at the defeated soldiers and cheer for their Roman troops. At the end of this parade, these prisoners would be slaughtered. That’s the parade that is going on right now—demons on parade. Jesus defeated and disarmed them at the cross and is now leading them in triumphal procession to their destruction.
The message is that these powers can no longer hurt the Christian. The message is that, as Paul told the Romans, “neither angels nor demons… nor any powers… nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
The Colossians would have been quite concerned about the demonic realm. In general we would be wise to be more concerned about these dark powers. There are many forces at work in this world. The message here is that the demons are vicious, but Christ is tougher. He defeated them. He disarmed them. He now leads them in parade to their death.
He did it by the cross; “triumphing over them by the cross,” as verse 15 puts it. The demonic powers thought that the cross was a stunning victory for them. Remember Satan put it in Judas’ heart to betray Jesus over to a cruel death. Well, what the demons thought of as a victory was actually a defeat. As FF Bruce put it, “The very instrument of disgrace and death by which the hostile forces thought they had [Jesus] in their grasp and had conquered him forever was turned by him into the instrument of their defeat and disablement.” The demons thought they were leading Jesus to his death as he walked to Calvary; he was leading them to their deaths.
You don’t need to be afraid of these dark powers now. You don’t need to be afraid of your record of sin. You don’t need to be afraid of the fact that you can’t change yourself. Jesus did it all—all to him you owe. That’s what it will take to live a changed life, to live as if your record is cancelled, to live as if you are free from dark forces. You can’t live daily with faith in what Jesus has done without having faith in Jesus.
That’s the choice before Beverly. She’s tired of trying to change herself, but just because she can’t doesn’t mean no one else can. Jesus can. She needs to find in him her all in all. So do I. So do you. Amen.