Colossians 2:16-23 –
16 Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. 17 These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. 18 Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind, 19 and not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God.
20 If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations— 21 “Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch” 22 (referring to things that all perish as they are used)—according to human precepts and teachings? 23 These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.
Introduction
Good morning. Thanks, Kyle for taking us back into the Psalms. I appreciate your trans-Psalm reminder that God-honoring emotions flow from God-honoring truths and lead to God-honoring lives. In addition, earlier in the week I mentioned to Kyle that I was especially helped by a few lines from his sermon.
- “Music is one of God’s key tools for steering our emotions.”
- “Chopped up air isn’t pleasing to God by itself. But a heart satisfied in God producing chopped up air”.
- And, “Singing together with God’s people on Sundays is God’s means of filling our joy reservoir for the week.”
With that, once again, welcome back to this familiar passage in Colossians. Throughout the two weeks we’ve already spent in it, we’ve seen that all of life is a continual choice between living according to elemental spirits/principles of this world and living according to Christ. Everyone sees the world through a particular lens, and our lens is either Christ or anything else. And within all of that, Paul’s main focus was on urging the church to hold fast to Jesus; to live according to Jesus; to look see the world through the lens of Christ.
Why did Paul write so emphatically about this? He gave three main reasons: (1) Elemental principles are by definition, mere human constructs; mere self-made religion with only an appearance of wisdom (but are folly); and will ultimately come to an unsatisfying and destructive end. (2) The world is Christ’s. It is from, for, and to Him. In Him alone are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge and He alone is preeminent over all things. So why would we live according to anyone or anything else?! (3) To be a Christian is to have chosen to reject worldly ways of thinking as the lies they are; it is to have rejected all competing claims to Christ’s imperium; it is to have accepted Christ as the way, the truth, and the life; and it is to have died to the world with Jesus.
Having seen all of that, there’s a phrase in the middle of the verse in the middle of the passage that I want to unpack a bit more. In v.20 Paul wrote, “If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, [do you live] as if you were still alive in the world…?”
Paul’s clear implication is that Christians are no longer “alive in the world.” And by that curious sounding phrase he was asking the Colossians to consider why they were thinking and acting like they did before they trusted in Jesus. In particular, he was asking them to consider the various ways they were seeing the world through anything other than the lens of Christ.
Once again, I want to slow down a bit and consider on a deeper and more practical level what it means to live as if we are “still alive in the world” today. What are our primary temptations to see things apart from Christ? If Paul were writing to the church in Wyoming in 2026, how would he finish the verse, “Why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you _____?”
As we do, we’ll see the big idea of this message: In Christ alone, and through God’s Word alone, can we see the world and our place in it as they truly are. Looking through any other lens always leads to a distorted perspective and a disordered life. The main takeaway is to carefully consider where we’re seeing the world through a worldly lens (and therefore acting as if we were still alive in the world) and replace it with the lens of Christ.
Alive In the World
The main question, once again, is this: Are we living as those who are alive in the world or as those alive in Christ? Are we seeing the world through a distinctly Christian lens or some type of a worldly lens?
Paul will make that even clearer in the next section of his letter (next week), when he commands, “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.”
Alive in the World Vs. Alive in Christ
In just a minute, we’ll consider eight alive-in-the-world ideas that are wreaking havoc on the world and Church today. Before we get there, though,I’d like to say a brief word on two aspects of the relationship between being alive in the world vs. being alive in Christ. For Christians, they’re simultaneously (1) mutually exclusive and (2) experienced on a sliding scale.
Being alive in the world is mutually exclusive from being alive in Christ in that only one or the other can be true of us at one time. If we are alive in the world, then we are entirely dead in Christ. And if we are alive in Christ, then we are entirely dead in the world.
Of the Colossian Christians, Paul objectively declared, “…with Christ you died to the elemental spirits [principles] of the world” and later, “you have died [to the world], and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”
In the middle of chapter 2 we find out how the transition takes place in us, “…you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, 14 by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross” (2:13-14).
We are either dead to Christ and alive to the world in our sin (which is everyone from birth) or alive in Christ and dead to the sins of the world (which is ours by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, accomplished by the cross alone).
And yet, as we all know, our objective reality does not always shape our hearts, minds, and daily lives as it ought. And in that way, on a practical level, as Christians we live on a sliding scale between seeing the world as we did when we were alive in the world and seeing as it truly is now that we are alive in Christ.
The most illuminating example I’ve heard concerns the perspective the slaves freed by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. At the Proclamation, as a matter of objective fact, Southern slaves were immediately declared “forever free.” However, as you can imagine, that did not mean that they immediately saw the world in the same way as those who had never been enslaved. Being a freeman and learning to think and function like a freeman are two different things. Becoming a freeman is instant. Thinking and acting like one is a process.
And so it is for Christians. We pass from death to life the moment we first place our faith in Jesus (like a light switch—either off or on; all one or all the other), but we spend the rest of our lives being transformed by the Spirit to live consistently with what’s already true of us (like a dimmer switch—varying degrees of brightness).
In more practical terms, while non-Christian can only see the world through a worldly lens, because we are being but are not yet fully sanctified, Christians always see the world through some combination of worldly and Christianly lenses. Paul’s charge to his readers (including us) is to recognize that there is lingering worldly thinking in all of us and to do everything we can to weed it out. Again, helping with that is the main aim of this sermon.
Alive in the World in Colossians
As we saw, there were three primary alive-in-the-world ways of thinking (or elemental spirits/principles) Paul warned the Colossians of: Asceticism (don’t do certain things) and legalism (do certain things) to earn or keep God’s favor and mysticism (visions and dreams) to know God’s will. Those were the ideas that the world had come up with in contradiction to the world as it really is; in contradiction to Jesus.
Therefore, Paul warned them of the futility and danger of continuing to live in light of them as they once had. Indeed, at the heart of the Colossian heresy was the idea that God’s favor could be earned or maintained through anything in us. And in response, he commended to them the mind of Christ; namely that God’s favor is ours only by grace, through faith, in the uniquely sufficient merit and sacrificial death of Jesus.
Alive in the World Today
If those were their alive-in-the world temptations and Paul’s alive-in-Christ responses, what are ours? Where are we prone to think and feel and act as if we “were still alive in the world”? Where are we likely to look at the world with the mind of the world rather than Christ? If Paul were writing to us, what worldly ideas would he warn us of?
What follows is by no means meant to be considered a definitive or exhaustive list or a definitive or exhaustive answer to any item on the list. It’s not in any particular order. It’s not even mainly my list. But it is an important start if we truly mean to recognize the temptations common to all of us in our current cultural context; and that, in order that we might weed out the lies and replace them with truth; that we might put off our worldly thinking and put on Christ’s; that we might think and act in accordance with the world as it really is.
Let me give you a quick example of what I mean. When I first came to faith in Jesus, I didn’t even understand that being a Christian meant anything beyond believing the simple truths of the gospel. I had no sense that to be alive in Christ is to see everything in Christ—art and science and marriage and work and nature and money and family and entertainment and friendships and everything.
Over time, without really understanding what was happening, I began to see certain things differently. One of the first that I remember concerned whether God meant women to be pastors. It was entirely disorienting to realize that my thinking on matters like that needed to be rooted in something beyond my semi-sanctified common sense.
Next came things like the nature of the Bible, God’s relationship to creation, and dating.
I began to lean what the Bible teaches on an increasing number of individual matters, but they were all separate in my mind. I still hadn’t realized that I needed a comprehensively Christian view of reality (or that there even was such a thing).
In God’s kindness, over time, I did begin to see that what was true in all the individual issues I’d traversed, was true of all reality—it is all rooted in Christ and understood only with the Spirit’s interpretive help as we study God’s Word and creation. At the same time, I began to see that it is one thing to recognize that and something else to actually weed out all the lies and discover all the truths.
What follows, then, is a list of eight ways I think we are particularly prone to living as if were still alive in the world. Actually, what follows is three lists that I compiled into one. The first five ideas are from two different books (Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age by Rosaria Butterfield and The Pandemic of Lunacy by J. Budziszewski; who actually lists 30 lunacies of our modern times) and the final three are things I’ve seen the most among us.
My aim, once again, is to point you to the kinds of things that are leading many astray, even inside the church. My aim is to help you recognize them, that you might turn from them to that which is good, beautiful, and true—to the mind of Christ. My aim is to help you no longer live as if you were alive in the world in these ways.
- Being a spiritual person is kinder than being a biblical Christian. This idea is everywhere around us. The basic idea—the worldly thinking embedded in this line of thinking—is that to be generically spiritual is to have soft edges, and soft edges are kind, and kindness is always best. Conversely, it is also the idea that Christianity has hard edges and hard edges are mean and mean is bad.
I have a friend who was a part of the Unitarian Universalist Church for a while. Their mantra (he told me), which is the kind of thing that a “spiritual person” can claim, is: “Deeds, Not Doctrine”. The implication, of course, is that doing good to others (deeds) is kind and right, while drawing lines that exclude and divide (doctrine) is unkind and wrong.
But the mind of Christ knows that it is doctrine that determines which deeds are good and which are not. How do we know that feeding the homeless is a kind deed and ignoring them is not? Doctrine is the answer.
What’s more, the mind of Christ knows that it is the hard edges of Christianity that provide us with the solid ground we need to stand on if we are to offer real help to those who are suffering.
And most of all, the mind of Christ recognizes that our first duty to others isn’t kindness, but love. Grace, the mind of Christ knows that kindness without love is evil.
If we’re not careful and courageous, we’ll succumb to the ever-present pull towards worldly kindness at the expense of what the world needs most (the truth lived out in love). Indeed, if we’re not careful, we won’t even recognize the difference.
The second alive-in-the-world claim that I want to highlight is a duzy. In fact, it’s three duzies that I’ve lumped together because they all have the same alive-in-the-world root problem—they deny the existence of a divinely created and immutable order. - Homosexuality and transgenderism are normal and feminism is good for the world. The “alive-in-the-world” idea here is that gender and sexual norms are nothing more than social constructs. And if they are nothing more than social constructs, then whatever is common is normal. Likewise, the idea behind feminism is that there is no fundamental, intentional difference between men and women outside of basic biology. Under that belief, it is good to attempt to dismantle relationships and institutions that perpetuate and reinforce anything that restricts a woman’s access to anything men have access to.
Indeed, if maleness and femaleness and physical intimacy are not things designed and regulated by God, then there can be no real disorder, which again means that whatever is common is normal.
But there is a God who lovingly and wonderfully created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1), who created mankind as male and female, which are binary and immutable characteristics of human nature (Genesis 1:27), and those in order to complimentarily reflect glorious and gracious aspects of God’s nature and purposes in this world.
And there is a God who lovingly and wonderfully made physical intimacy to be between one man and one women, to be within the context of a life-long, covenant union; not merely as a means of physical pleasure, but as a means of creating a oneness unique to marriage and in the shape of the gospel.
The mind of Christ acknowledges God’s good design in maleness and femaleness and physical intimacy, seeks to conform to them, and sacrificially works to help others see the goodness of God design and power to help, forgive, and restore all that worldly thinking has distorted.
Chances are decent that most of this is familiar to most of you, but we’re foolish to think that there aren’t seeds of this alive-in-the-world thinking in us. Ladies, you find them every time you fail to properly come under the headship of your husband or treat him with disrespect. Men, you find them every time you look at pornography and abdicate your God-given role to love your wife and live with her in an understanding way or lead the church and your home toward godliness. Let us weed them out together, that we might truly have the mind of Christ and with it, live for His glory in His world.
(The next three come from a different book. The first is that…) - Marriage can be whatever we want it to be. This next idea follows right on the heels of the last one (even as the next one follows right on the heels of them all). The mind of the world says that, like sex and sexual preferences, marriage is a merely human institution that can be continually molded to fit our ever-changing cultural preferences.
Years ago, I was a part of a group that met with one of the officers of the Minnesota Atheists’ Club. Throughout the course of our meeting, the man kept claiming that Christianity is bad in large measure because Christians treat homosexuals as second class citizens. When pressed to explain, he stated, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, that no good person and no good religion would deny two people who love each other the right to marry one another.
The choice is rather simple, either marriage (like biological sex and sexual relations) is something designed purposefully and lovingly by God and is, therefore, immutable, or the Minnesota atheists and homosexual lobbyists are right in claiming that marriage is whatever we want it to be.
The mind of Christ recognizes that marriage is not ours to shape any more than are gender and sexuality. They are all given to us by God for His awesome purposes: To exclusively house physical intimacy, and physical intimacy primarily for the possibility of one-flesh unions, procreation, sexual protection, and relational joy; and all of that to paint the most vivid picture of the gospel that mankind can portray.
Again, while most of us have more of the mind of Christ in the area of marriage, we must be on the lookout for seeds of this lie. We find seeds every time we entertain romantic, emotionally intimate, or lustful thoughts toward someone other than our spouse. We find seeds every time we act as if our spouse exists to do our bidding and make us happy. We find seeds of this every time we fail to forgive our spouse as Christ forgives us. We find seeds of this whenever we do anything in our marriage without conscious intent to reflect the gospel.
As I mentioned, all of that was inevitably heading to the fourth alive-in-the-world idea. None of those would be possible without this next one. They are all subcategories of it.
- Each person has his own reality and there’s no such thing as objective goodness. I took an undergraduate philosophy course in the mid 90s on postmodernism when postmodernism was just beginning to gain traction. The professor’s most often repeated phrase was: We create the reality that creates us.
To help us appreciate the usefulness and accuracy of this idea, he referenced a play featuring Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the childhood friends of Hamlet (in the Shakespearean play). The clever and relevant angle is that the play retold Hamlet through their eyes. And through their eyes everything was comically different.
Again, my professor’s point was that there is no objective way to tell whose perspective was right/wrong or even better/worse. Perspective is just perspective, he argued.
The simple idea behind that line of thinking is that apart from a privileged frame of reference (something that all reality is rightly measured off of), then who is to say that any one person’s perspective, experience, or ideas are any better than anyone else’s?
And if that’s the case, of course we create the reality that creates us and of course there’s nothing objectively good (or bad or beautiful or true or right or wrong or anything else).
But the mind of Christ knows that things are as God sees them. He is the eternal, perfect Privileged frame of reference. Our role in life is not to write or tell the story of our own perspective, but to conform our perspective to God’s, who alone sees all things as they truly are. And the mind of Christ knows that in His Word, God has given us everything we need to know about living in light of God’s perspective.
Of everything we’ve covered so far, I imagine that this one is perhaps the easiest to find seeds of in our own lives. O, how often do we insist on our way of seeing things? How often do we decide what to do based on how we feel about our own interpretation of some event? How many relational conflicts are currently festering among us because we have forgotten that God alone fully sees things as they are and interprets them properly?
May we find every flower, plant, and seed of that kind of alive-in-the-world thinking and surrender it to Christ. - Shifting gears…the purpose of government is to take care of all our needs. Even through a worldly lens, it’s easy to see that there’s lot that is wrong in the world today. Homelessness, poverty, sickness, disease, war, greed, theft, broken homes, etc. It’s also easy to see that the most powerful, visible force in our lives is the government, with trillions of dollars, millions of bullets, mass destruction-capable bombs, prisons, police forces, laws, and all kinds of other means of coercion.
In those terms, it makes sense that we would want to leverage all that power to take care of our health, regulate our gatherings, make sure we don’t go hungry, keep us safe, handle the problems caused by drugs, educate our kids, provide housing, pay for college or career training, create jobs, oversee the economy, pave our streets, regulate our marriages, guard our borders, and stop the world from getting too hot or cold. If the most powerful force on earth can’t do it, who can?
In contrast, the mind of Christ recognizes the goodness of government in God’s design, but also the limits of its God-given power and scope. God made government for a particular purpose and with a particular authority. The purpose is to punish evil and promote good (Romans 13:1-4), in order that God’s people might live godly lives in peace (1 Timothy 2:2). And the authority is the sword (the ability to physically hold back evil, even to the point of putting to death those who will not relent). All governments are under God’s authority.
The mind of Christ further recognizes that God has created the home and church to do much of what the government has taken upon itself.
The mind of Christ acknowledges the problems in the world, but it also accepts God’s solution for them, rather than attempting to create our own.
I see seeds of this in every election cycle, in the anxiety that rises as terrible things are threatened if we vote for the wrong side. I see seeds of this in the expectations we have for and the things we tolerate from our government. In a time when our government continues to get more and more bloated, it’s more important than ever to have the mind of Christ.
The final three alive-in-the-world lines of thinking that threaten the Church today are, as I mentioned, my own observations. They are three things I’ve seen do significant damage to God’s people. For the sake of time, I’m only able to quickly name them. I imagine unpacking them more fully at some point. - Our true nature is ours to determine. We considered some of the more egregious expressions of this earlier (I am my sexual appetite or my gender preference or whatever I feel like). But in the Church there tends to be more subtle expressions of this. This happens every time we fail to understand and live out of our identity in Christ. It happens every time we name ourselves or allow others to do it for us. The mind of Christ, though, knows that God alone names; that we are who and what and for what God says we are.
- To love someone is to affirm whatever they want affirmed. This too has more obnoxious versions outside of the Church, but it’s no less problematic inside; albeit in more disguised forms. In my office in counseling as well as in my more casual conversations, I can’t tell you the number of times a husband, wife, son, daughter, sibling, or friend has been nearly crushed because they weren’t being “loved,” where being loved meant seeing things their way and being given what they felt they deserved. The mind of Christ, though, knows that love is the sacrificial and affectionate pursuit of that which is best for another; and that “best” is defined by God alone.
- The local church plays a small and optional role in God’s plan of salvation. I really am thankful for so much of what God is doing among us and for the relative health we have as a church. At the same time, it is easy to see that it is not yet in our bones (that we do not yet fully have the mind of Christ which knows) that our primary purpose on earth is to glorify God by inviting the whole world to follow Jesus with us into and out of the local church.
Again, this isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list. There are other equally significant lies believed and taught by those alive in the world. And again, this isn’t even a particularly well-ordered list.
My main point isn’t even any of these points. My main point is that there is a distinctly Christian way to think of, understand, and live in response to everything we encounter. That is, to be a Christian is to believe that God alone created, named, ordered, sustains, and ultimately judges all that has been made. Which means that all things are and are for what God says they are and are for, and that every alternative is some degree of untruth, disorder, and corruption.
And all of that collectively is what Paul means by “set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.” And failing to do so is what he means by “If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, [do you act] as if you were still alive in the world…?”.
Conclusion
The big idea of this message is that in Christ alone, and through God’s Word alone, can we see the world and our place in it as they truly are. Looking through any other lens always leads to a distorted perspective and a disordered life. The main takeaway is to carefully consider where we’re seeing the world through a worldly lens and replace it with the lens of Christ.
But this is no mere intellectual exercise. This is not mainly about intellectual integrity or consistency. It’s certainly not mainly about yelling at the world for their corrupted thinking. It’s mainly about rejoicing in and living in light of the facts that God is infinitely glorious and His design for His world is perfectly good. It is mainly about God’s kindness in revealing to us what it means to live the abundant life that Jesus came to bring (John 10:10). It is mainly about treasuring Christ, who came to restore all that our worldly thinking has destroyed. As Kyle says, God-honoring truths are meant to lead to God-honoring affections and lives.
God has given us His Word, His Spirit, and His people to help us with these things. May we seek them, therefore, with even greater zeal, greater reliance on the Spirit, greater dependance on His Word, and greater support from one another; for the glory of God and the good of the world.