A message on avoiding spiritual substitutes
“16 Therefore do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day. 17 These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ.
18 Do not let anyone who delights in false humility and the worship of angels disqualify you for the prize. Such a person goes into great detail about what he has seen, and his unspiritual mind puffs him up with idle notions. 19 He has lost connection with the Head, from whom the whole body, supported and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows as God causes it to grow.
20 Since you died with Christ to the basic principles of this world, why, as though you still belonged to it, do you submit to its rules: 21“Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!”? 22 These are all destined to perish with use, because they are based on human commands and teachings. 23 Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.”
Logan is twenty-one. He just started dating Shane’s daughter Audrey. Shane is protective of Audrey and there is a lot to be said for that impulse. Shane wants to make sure that Logan is good enough for his daughter.
One Sunday Logan joins the family in worship. Shane notices that Logan seems totally lost when trying to use the hymnal to find the form of baptism during baptism. A month later Logan joins them again. When the church says the Lord’s Prayer together, Logan says “trespasses” instead of “debts”—“forgive us our trespasses.” ‘You know, honey,” Shane tells his daughter after Logan leaves, ‘“trespass” people aren’t like us “debt” people.’ Logan joins them yet again a couple weeks later—Audrey is really excited that their relationship is moving forward—and this time Shane noticed that Logan doesn’t put his head down during the part we call “God’s Greeting.” That night, Shane tells his wife that he’s going to have a little talk with Logan about showing some respect when he, and I quote, “comes into the house of God.”
“What in the world has gotten into you?” his wife asks. The apostle Paul could explain what’s gotten into Shane. Paul would say that it’s got nothing to do with Logan. It’s got everything to do with Shane’s customs and chosen ways. Shane is putting them ahead of Christ. Beware of putting customs, cherish experiences, and chosen ways above Christ. That’s the claim of this sermon.
We will study this in two points. First: don’t put tradition above Christ. Second: don’t be entranced by the mystical. Third: don’t be ruled by others’ practices. First, in verses 16-17, don’t put tradition over Christ. Second, in verses 18-19, don’t be entranced by the mystical. Third, in verses 20-23, don’t be ruled by others’ practices.
First: don’t put tradition above Christ. In our last study in Colossians, we saw that while we can’t change ourselves, Christ can. He does soul surgery on us killing our sinful nature. He nails our citations of sin to the cross. His death disarmed the demonic powers. We didn’t make any of that happen. We received it from Christ. The Colossians received it all from Christ. Now they were being told by religious leaders that they needed to add to it. That’s what’s going on this week as you can see in verse 16, “Therefore do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day. These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ.”
Shane’s customs and chosen ways were simply Dutch Reformed—this traditions way of saying the Lord’s Prayer with “debts”, using forms out of our hymnal, and the tradition of bowing one’s head during God’s greeting. The customs and chosen ways being imposed on the Colossians were Jewish in origin.
As the early church spread, the Jews who grew up with their customs and chosen ways compelled the Gentiles to keep these customs. So Greeks or Romans or Egyptians no longer needed just to come to Christ. They needed to live like Jews too. These Colossians Christians were being told that to be good Christians they needed to keep Jewish festivals and celebrations as well as Sabbaths. Now the issue of Sabbath and the Lord’s Day today is more complicated than this, but we don’t have time for all that this morning.
What we have time for is seeing that what was happening in Colossae is exactly what the council at Jerusalem in Acts 15 dealt with when new converts were being told, “Unless you are circumcised, according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved.” At that council, Peter stood up and dropped the truth, “why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of Gentiles a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear? No! We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are.”
The various rituals of the Old Testament—circumcision, food laws, ceremonial washings, the temple sacrificial system—these were just signs that pointed to Christ. “These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ,” as verse 1 puts it. Now that the substance had come the shadows fell away.
Think about it this way. Imagine that you visit Disney World to go on their new roller coaster The Slinky Dog Dash. Please bring up the picture.
You ride it and you love it. You want to ride it again but are told that you can’t but that you can stand in its shadow. Please bring up the second picture.
The Disney employee tells you that standing in the shadow of The Slinky Dog Dash is just as good as the ride. It’s obviously not. You are told that unless you are willing to stand in that shadow that you are unworthy to ride The Slinky Dog Dash. You would think that employee is nuts.
That’s what those false teachers were trying to do to these poor Colossian Christians. They were trying to force them into the shadows rather than just letting them ride the ride. They were trying to force them into the customs and chosen ways. That’s what, in his own way, Shane is trying to do to Logan. Those Colossian teachers were all upset because the Colossians who grew up eating pork didn’t stop when they came to Christ. “God’s people ought to act like God’s people,” they would say. That’s what not Paul said. He said that the coming of Jesus made clear that it wasn’t what went into the body—pork in this case—that made anyone unclean but what came out of it. “For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what make a man unclean,” as Jesus put it. Shane is all upset because Logan says “debts” rather than “trespasses,” in the Lord’s prayer. Shane cherishes the idea of God forgiving him a massive debt he could never forgive. He thinks Logan’s “forgive us our trespasses,” instead of “debts” diminishes that. It doesn’t. “Debts” and “trespasses” are just two different translations of Jesus’ prayer. The forgiveness is the reality here.
Now Shane can find great joy in saying “debts” when he says the Lord’s prayer. He can write in his journal how much the idea of being forgiven a debt by God means to him. That’s great and can be used by God to grow Shane in grace, but Shane has no business imposing his custom and chosen way on Logan just like the false teachers in Colossae had no right to impose their customs and chosen ways on those early Christians who were probably just about as bewildered as Logan would be if Shane actually talked to him about any of this.
Unless Shane’s scruples are checked, they will have a stifling effect on his family. If those Jewish scruples were left unchecked, they would have had a stifling effect on that early church. That’s why Paul wrote this letter. If I equate my customs and chosen ways with being a good Christian, that will have a stifling effect on the people I love and encounter. If all of us together equate our customs and chosen ways with being a good Christian, that will have a stifling effect on this church.
So that’s customs and chosen ways that have to do with tradition. Now we think about experiences. That’s our second point: don’t be entranced by the mystical. These new Christians were not only being told that they needed to follow certain customs and chosen ways, they were also being told that good Christians had mystical experiences; verse 18, “Do not let anyone who delights in false humility and the worship of angels disqualify you for the prize. Such a person goes into great detail about what he has seen, and his unspiritual mind puffs him up with idle notions.”
Some people are captivated by out of body type experiences. For some it take the form of adrenaline. They can’t get enough of jumping out of planes or driving real fast. For others it looks like the immersive. They love virtual reality and like their movies on an IMAX screen. When they are at a concert, they want to feel the thump of the drums in their chest. There’s nothing wrong with any of this. Different people are different.
Some people in Colossae were really into out of body religious experiences. It’s easy to get caught up in this. I did when I was in college. Our worship band turned the volume up loud—real loud. I loved the spine-tingling sensation that came over me when that song that I couldn’t wait to sing started reverberating through the sanctuary. I came to think that, that was true worship—hundreds of young adults cheering for a new song for God—and that what I grew up with was somehow less. At Bauer CRC I couldn’t feel the drums in my chest so apparently that was somehow less. I came to see that I was more into the adrenaline than I was into the being changed from the inside. I was more into experience than I was into obedience. That’s a danger. Now elevating a traditional worship style because of nostalgia is problematic in its own way too. We can all interpret musical experiences as the way spirituality should be.
That’s likely what was going on in Colossae only not with music but with visions. It’s likely that people were fasting and treating their bodies in harsh ways—as we will see in our next point—to induce a sort of trance. This is part of the sweat lodge in Native American religion. People fast and sit in intense heat to induce mystical experiences. That’s what’s going on in the Amazon today. The rich have been going down there for years to drink a brew of plants that gives a psychedelic effect. It gives them an out of body experience. People say that they meet themselves as if they were someone else. They say they see themselves clearly for the first time. They learn how to accept themselves and others. People say it’s like decades of therapy packed into one experience. They say it helps them let go of all their bitterness and anger. It is a shortcut to spiritual maturity.
There was something similar going on in Colossae. The practitioners said that they were now worshipping like the angels. Paul told these new Christians not to be impressed by any of it; verse 18, “do not let anyone who delights in false humility and the worship of angels disqualify you for the prize. Such a person goes into great detail about what he has seen, and his unspiritual mind puffs him up with idle notions.”
Such obsessions with experiences were and are signs of spiritual pride. There is something within us humans that craves superior enlightenment. We want to be better than the mass of humanity. As one example, nobody watches a superhero movie and imagines what it would be like to be the third guy from the left. We all imagine what it would be like to be the Incredible Hulk. We imagine what it would be like to be somehow more than we are. WE want to move beyond what it means to be a regular human—just normal.
This shows up in religion. It can show up in prioritizing spine tingling sensations and equating it with spiritual maturity. It can show up with visions. “Oh, you haven’t had a vision that proves that you are really a Christian?” It shows up with something beyond the words of Christ that somehow proves we are good.
These people in Colossae had visions. They thought that made them somehow better. They told the Colossian Christians that they needed these visions too. Paul said that this just made them puffed up. Now Paul had visions too. He knew they were no shortcut to maturity. Paul wrote about his vision. He said that he was caught up to the highest heaven and that he, “heard inexpressible things, things that no one is permitted to tell.” He then wrote, ‘in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.’ In other words, “I won’t boast in visions. I won’t boast in out of body experiences. I won’t assume that spine tingling is a shortcut to maturity or means maturity. Maturity is learning that when I am weak, I am strong because that’s when I know it is about Jesus and not about me. It’s being connected with Christ that’s causes the Christian to grow. Don’t think that you are missing out if you don’t feel a certain way in worship. The question is whether you are offered Christ.
So, people were really into visions in Colossae. They were also into their own spiritual training regimens. Paul warned these new Christians not to fall for it. That’s our final point: don’t be ruled by others’ practices.
These so-called super-Christians in Colossae had rules that they thought made them super; verse 21, “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!” These rules may have been based on the customs and chosen ways we studied in the first point. They certainly had to do with stimulating the spiritual experiences we just studied as verse 23 makes clear, “their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body.”
The idea here is that you can change your soul by way of the body. You can better your spiritual health by changing your physical health—think the Daniel Diet from a few years ago. The idea is that you have the means to change you who are inside. You don’t have the means to change yourself from the inside. All our attempts are fruitless. “These are all destined to perish with use, because they are based on human commands and teachings,” as verse 22 put it. Only Jesus can change what needs to be changed in any of us. Remember, he is the one who does the soul surgery. He is the one who cancels your logbook of citations of sin. He is the one who disarms the demonic powers. It is faith manifesting itself in love not your personal rules for living that connects with you the change you really need.
The idea that you can change yourself isn’t just foolish. It is prideful; as verse 23 puts it, “Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.” Submitting yourself to some sort of spiritual bootcamp in an attempt to change whatever in you needs to be changed won’t kill your sinful flesh; it will feed your sinful flesh because it assumes that you can change you.
James Proctor wrote a song about that generations ago. “Cast your deadly “doing” down—down at Jesus’ feet; stand in Him, in Him alone, gloriously complete.” True spiritual maturity consists in knowing that Jesus has done it all. It is the flesh in us that wants to add to Christ. We seem to think we need Jesus plus something else to be whole. We think others need Jesus plus something else in order to be worthy. Paul wrote Colossians to make clear that they could never have more than Jesus and that every time they tried to add to him, they would wind up with far less. They would wind up requiring what God doesn’t require.
That’s what’s going on with Shane. He’s adding “we say debts not trespasses” to Jesus. He’s putting forms written by well-meaning Christians on par with being a good Christian. He’s imposing customs that he gets a lot out of—like bowing his head during the greeting—and requiring them of his daughter’s boyfriend. That’s what’s gotten into Shane. It gets into me. It gets into you. That’s why the letter to the Colossians has been preserved for us. It’s been preserved so that we keep Christ in his place and customs and chosen ways in their places. Amen.