Truth That Changes Lives

JP Jones: You see, if you're here this morning and you're already a follower of Jesus Christ, the most important commitment that you could make today and the most important takeaway that you could have with you today is that you're going to keep on following Jesus Christ.

Guest (Male): Thank you for joining us on Truth That Changes Lives. Pastor JP Jones is the senior pastor of Crossline Community Church in Laguna Hills, California, and a professor in Biblical Studies at Biola University. Today on Truth That Changes Lives, Pastor JP will be giving us a message from a series entitled All About Jesus. Let's listen in as JP gives us part one of The Reality In Christ.

JP Jones: If you have your Bibles, would you open to Colossians chapter two. Colossians chapter two, we're continuing our study in this book that's all about Jesus. And we're going to see once again in this passage that we look at this morning that it is indeed all about Jesus Christ.

In fact, I'm going to take 30 minutes to try to persuade you to embrace a principle that only takes a couple of seconds to state. Here's the principle: the reality is found in Christ. In fact, say that with me: the reality is found in Christ.

Now I'm going to take about 30 minutes to try to persuade you that that is true because just like the audience that Paul wrote to in the church at Colossae, we are people who are tempted to embrace counterfeit spiritualities, counterfeit approaches to God, a counterfeit Christianity. So what Paul is doing in this passage is he contrasts counterfeit Christianity with authentic Christianity and his ultimate statement is this: the reality is found in Christ.

And what I hope every one of us will embrace as we leave here is that the reality is found in Christ and the reality in our lives is found in Jesus Christ. You see, if you're here this morning and you're already a follower of Jesus Christ, the most important commitment that you could make today and the most important takeaway that you could have with you today is that you're going to keep on following Jesus Christ.

And if you're here as a seeker, someone who was invited here as a guest, someone who's maybe trying to figure out whether you believe in God or not or you believe in Jesus or not, what I want to tell you is that there are a lot of false, counterfeit religious paths that are presented to us today, but the only truth is Jesus Christ. The reality is in Jesus Christ.

Let me pray for us. God, I pray that this morning there would be a sense in which every one of us embraces this truth and it would set us free. That we would understand the beauty and majesty and holiness and forgiveness and grace of Jesus and that our hearts would be surrendered to Jesus, our minds would be surrendered to Jesus, our life would be surrendered to Jesus, that every one of us would be able to say that we are focusing and committing ourselves to Jesus Christ. Lord Jesus, I pray that you would be worshiped and glorified in this place. We pray in your name, Amen.

Colossians chapter two, starting at verse 16. "Therefore do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink or with regard to a religious festival or 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. 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. 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.

Since you died with Christ to the basic principles of this world, why, as though you still belong to it, do you submit to its rules: 'Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!'? These are all destined to perish with use, because they are based on human commands and teachings. 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."

"Since then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. And when Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory."

In this passage, Paul is writing to the pressures and concerns and influences that were being faced by his audience. He knew his audience well. He knew that they were a group of people who were being pulled on the one hand by secular philosophy, religious legalism, and then on another front, they were being pulled by mystical New Age spiritualism.

They were people who brought with them into the church baggage. Baggage in terms of their thinking, baggage in terms of their feeling, baggage in terms of their living. They were people a lot like us. I mean, every one of us here has a certain take on reality. We have a certain world view, we have a certain religious world view. And to the degree that it's focused on Christ, it's accurate, it's true. But to the degree that it focuses on something else, it's counterfeit.

It may be that you are very sincere in your worship, but your experience is counterfeit. It's not authentic to what Jesus Christ has come to do for us and who Jesus Christ is. Paul contrasts the counterfeit with the authentic. And he goes into great detail about the counterfeit because it truly has infected us all. And it's the truth that sets us free. It's the truth that roots out error.

So let's unpack what Paul has to say about counterfeit Christianity and name it for what it really is. And if it's true in our lives, let's recognize that, let's repent of that, let's turn from that so that we can embrace true reality, who is Christ himself. Verse 16. "Therefore, do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink or with regard to a festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day. These are a shadow of the things that were to come."

This is a command. The command is don't let someone judge your spiritual experience. Now why would Paul command people not to let someone else judge them? Because someone else was judging them. And guess what? There are people who are judging us. And you know what? You may be the judge. You may be the person that's judging other people and the standard you're using is a false standard. It's a counterfeit standard.

See, there's just a human principle that we want to be well-liked, we want to be accepted, we want to please the people that we're in relationship with. And when we let people judge our spirituality, we begin to conform to their standard of spirituality. And if it's a counterfeit standard, we become counterfeit Christians. And there's a lot of counterfeit Christians in the church today. People who are in church Sunday after Sunday, but their actual experience is not authenticated by Jesus and the life of Jesus and the love of Jesus and the grace of Jesus. They're just trying to live up to the expectations of other people.

Paul says don't let people judge you. And then he gives a list of false criteria that we might look to to evaluate our spiritual life. He says don't let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink or with regard to a religious festival or a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day. Do you know spirituality has nothing to do with eating or drinking?

You are no more spiritual if you're a vegan or if you're a raging carnivore. You are no more spiritual if you're a teetotaler or you like to have a glass of wine with your meal. It has nothing to do with eating and drinking. Nothing. And anybody who tries to tell you that it has something to do with that is using a counterfeit standard to evaluate your spirituality.

Paul says don't let anyone judge you with eating or drinking or with regard to a religious festival or a New Moon celebration. You know in Judaism, there were quite a few religious festivals. I mean, those Jews know how to party. They celebrated, they continue to celebrate, and there's tremendous significance in the celebration.

But like anything, we can put our focus and attention on the external and not see the reality behind the external. And so whether the celebration was the Passover or the celebration was Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, or the celebration was Shavuot, the day of Pentecost, or the celebration was Purim, celebrating the experience of Esther, those things have a great reality. But when we focus on the external and judge ourselves and one another, we're counterfeit.

Don't let anyone judge you by whether you celebrate one holiday or another holiday, whether you do this on Easter or you don't do that on Christmas. Don't let anybody judge you that way. In fact, this may seem like obvious to you, but I wasn't raised going to church. I wasn't the son of a preacher and the grandson of a preacher. I was just a pagan. I didn't go to church.

And I was a Christian, a follower of Jesus, I was in the ministry and didn't know that there's actually a religious calendar that the church follows. Maybe some of you were raised in a church in a denomination that followed a certain religious calendar and there were certain holidays and seasons, and there were certain things you were supposed to do on those holidays and certain things you were supposed to do in those seasons, and certain sermons that were supposed to be preached on certain days. I never even knew that and I was a pastor.

Whether you follow that calendar or don't follow that calendar has nothing to do with authentic Christianity. And when you make that the basis for judging your spirituality, it's a counterfeit. One of the things that was important within Judaism was the celebration of the Sabbath. In fact, that's one of the Ten Commandments. I mean, you can't get any more important than that, one of the top ten.

But listen to what Jesus said in Mark chapter two. One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grain fields and as his disciples walked along, they began to pick some heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, "Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?" He answered, "Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need? In the day of Abiathar the high priest, he entered the house of God and ate the consecrated bread which is lawful only for priests to eat, and he also gave the bread to his companions."

And then Jesus said to them, "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath." See, Jesus gave this teaching that the Sabbath was made for man and that the Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath because he was breaking the laws that the religious contemporaries of his day had set for the Sabbath.

Based on their evaluation, Jesus was unspiritual because he wasn't keeping the Sabbath the way they thought you should keep the Sabbath. If you say, "I can do this and that on Monday to Saturday, but I can only do these things on Sunday," that's counterfeit Christianity. If you say, "I can only worship on Sunday," that's counterfeit Christianity. If you can say, "Oh, I'm even more spiritual, I worship on the real Sabbath, which is Friday night to Saturday," that's counterfeit Christianity.

When you elevate a day above other days and then you have special rules for that day, you've put all the focus on the external and you're not seeing the internal that stands behind it. That's counterfeit Christianity. The reality is in Christ. Let's say that again. The reality is in Christ. It's not in a day, it's not in a festival, it's not in eating or drinking. Paul's writing to a group of people that were affected with this whole idea of counterfeit Christianity.

And then he says this, this is Colossians 2:17. "All these things are shadows of the things to come." Now that's an interesting word when he says they're shadows of the things to come. Remember Paul understood his culture. Paul is writing to a group of people who were affected not just by religious legalism and religious mysticism, but also by secular philosophy. You see, these people understood the Greek idea of dualism.

And they were infected with this worldview that kind of separated the material versus the spiritual. And actually they were affected by a Platonic idea. Now I'm going to take some of you back to high school world civilization, college philosophy class, where you read a book by Plato called The Republic. Plato was an ancient philosopher and Plato in The Republic tells of a dialogue that Socrates had and a story that he gave called the Allegory of the Cave.

In the Allegory of the Cave, these guys were chained to a chair looking up at a wall and behind them was a fire and people were walking and putting pots of statues on their head and it cast a shadow and the shadow was up on the wall. But because the people were chained to the chair, they never saw the people, they didn't know there was a fire behind them. All they saw was a shadow. They thought the shadow was the reality.

And then one day a guy gets set free and he discovers the shadow is not the reality, that it's a shadow and he's the philosopher in the story. And then he's able to interpret reality for everyone. And Plato developed out of that an understanding of reality that there are representations of reality which we call the phenomena and then there's the ultimate reality which is the noumena. The shadow on the wall is just a phenomena of what was actually the noumena.

Now, Paul's writing to an audience of people who kind of understood that. And so he takes that very way of understanding which they embraced and he says, "You know all these religious externals, holy days, eating and drinking, the Sabbaths, rules and regulations? They're just shadows. The reality is what casts the shadow. The reality is in Christ."

The stuff is just a shadow. Coming to this church, that's a shadow. Being baptized, that's a shadow. Keeping certain spiritual rules that help you grow spiritually, those are shadows. They're not the substance. And when we start making them the substance, confusing the shadows with what is reality, it's counterfeit Christianity. And some of us maybe, maybe that's why we've never actually committed ourselves to become followers of Christ.

The famous British historian Arnold Toynbee once said, "Most people have not rejected Christianity, but a poor caricature of it." It may be that you've been confusing the poor caricature with the reality. Paul here is saying it's easy to do. In fact, I'm writing this letter to people who've been steeped in a false way of thinking. It's created baggage and they are missing the reality. And the reality is in Jesus Christ.

But there's a counterfeit version of it. There's a counterfeit version. And so Paul is warning us about counterfeit Christianity. And he continues and says in 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."

First there was a command, don't let anybody judge you. And here is a command: don't let anybody disqualify you from the prize. The word to disqualify is the word to umpire. He's taken a word that was used in sports and the role of an umpire in rendering a judgment call. And he says don't let anybody act like an umpire over your spirituality.

Now why would he say that? Because there are people who will act like umpires over our spirituality. Sometimes we are the people who act like umpires over other people's spirituality. That's counterfeit Christianity. He says don't let anybody act like that, take that role in your life, because the standard that they use is a false standard.

He says in this passage that this counterfeit version is characterized by false humility, the worship of angels. Such a person goes into great detail about what he has seen and his unspiritual mind puffs him up with idle notions. See, it's a false spirituality, it's a false humility because when he talks about the worship of angels, there was a view which infected the folks at Colossae—it was Gnosticism—which basically had bought into this Greek philosophy of the separation between what was real and what was the representation of what was real. And it taught that that which was of spirit was good and that which was of material was evil.

And therefore, the only way you could approach God is through spiritual manifestations. And so they taught that there were a series of angelic manifestations that served as the intermediaries to get to God. Now here's what Paul's saying. He says there are certain teachers out there who will basically say, "You know, I'm not worthy to get to God on my own. So I go through the angels. Aren't I spiritual? I'm really humble because I don't boldly come to God, I go through the angels. Yeah, let's pray."

I mean, it's a false spirituality. Because you know what Jesus says? You know what Jesus says in Hebrews chapter four? It says boldly come to the throne of grace that you might receive grace and mercy in your time of need. We don't have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weakness, but one who was tempted in all points as we are, yet without sin.

We can boldly come to Jesus Christ himself. We don't have to go through angels to get there, and we don't have to go through people to get there. We can go straight to Jesus. Why? Because the reality is in Jesus Christ. But there are some people who say there are these various paths and approaches and paradigms and steps that we have to take.

And they say it with kind of a humble attitude, but the more you get closer to it, you realize it's not humble at all. It's really prideful. It's really self-driven and self-serving. That's counterfeit. That's counterfeit. So Paul is saying you've got to be aware of that which is counterfeit and false. And he says about this counterfeit Christianity, he says such a person goes into great detail about what he has seen and his unspiritual mind puffs him up with idle notions.

He's talking about the fact that people's personal spiritual experience is self-authenticating and in effect they're saying, "I've had this spiritual experience and unless you have the same spiritual experience I've had, you're not spiritual." You ever had anybody lay that trip on you? "I've had this vision, I've had this dream, I've had this ecstatic utterance, I've had this spiritual gift experience and unless you have it exactly the way I did, you don't have the real thing."

What's interesting about that is Peter in 2 Peter chapter one, verse 16, says, "We didn't follow cleverly devised tales when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. We were eyewitnesses to his glory. And we heard the majestic voice from heaven that said, 'This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.'"

Peter's talking about the Mount of Transfiguration experience. He was there on the Mount of Transfiguration when God the Father spoke and said, "This is my beloved Son." That's the greatest spiritual experience you could ever imagine. And then Peter says in the very next verse, he says, "But we have the more certain prophetic word and you do well to pay attention to it as you would to the morning star that rises in your hearts."

Peter just articulates, "I was on the Mount of Transfiguration with Jesus. We didn't follow cleverly devised tales when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. We were eyewitnesses. I actually heard God the Father speak to God the Son, 'You're my beloved Son with whom I'm well pleased.' The greatest spiritual experience you can imagine." And then he says, "We have the more certain prophetic word."

In other words, God's word is more authoritative than his religious experience and he had the best of all religious experiences. Anybody comes to you and tries to tell you that you need to have the religious experience that they have, your warning meter ought to start going off on your religious scale. Because what has authority is Jesus Christ and his word.

Now, listen. I believe in religious experiences. I believe that God does miracles. I believe that God gives people's visions. I believe God gives people a prophetic word. But we ought to always measure all of that to the lordship of Christ and the authority of Christ in Scripture. And when somebody starts to tell you that unless you have that experience that they had, that's counterfeit Christianity. Because let's say it again: the reality is in Christ.

Guest (Male): What a great message for all of us today. Pastor JP provides us with great insight. That is why we'd like to make it available to you on CD. Just get in touch and mention today's date. We'll send it your way for just $5. Or if you'd like to support this ministry, you can write us at Truth That Changes Lives, 23331 Moulton Parkway, Laguna Hills, California, 92653, or give us a call at 949-916-0250. That's 949-916-0250.

For your gift of $25 or more, we will send you a signed copy of JP's new book, Facing Goliath. Please join us every Sunday at 9:00 or 11:00 a.m. at Crossline Church in Laguna Hills. The address is 23331 Moulton Parkway, Laguna Hills, California, 92653. Or check us out on the web at crosslinechurch.com.

We want to help you in your relationship with Christ. Please get in touch with us at Truth That Changes Lives, 23331 Moulton Parkway, Laguna Hills, California, 92653, or call us at 949-916-0250. On the internet, you will find us at crosslinechurch.com. We hope to see you at one of our services every Sunday at our new campus in Laguna Hills. For more information and directions, please go to crosslinechurch.com. Please join us next time on Truth That Changes Lives.