The Sufficiency of Christ
Colossians 2:8-23
I realize that last Sunday I preached my fifty‑fourth message in 1 Timothy. Somebody told me there aren't that many chapters in 1 Timothy. And somebody else said there aren't that many verses in 1 Timothy, but I think there are, I haven't counted them up. But I do believe you have been faithful to 1 Timothy so long that you deserve a break. And so this morning my heart is drawn to a very important subject that I want to share with you. The subject is "The sufficiency of Christ...The sufficiency of Christ."
You'll remember a couple of years ago I preached a message on the sufficiency of Scripture. About a year ago, another message on the sufficiency of spiritual resources. And this is the third in a sort of random triology on the sufficiency of Christ. The composite of all of these messages has, of course, to do with the fact that we possess all sufficiency for all things in Him. It's just very important from time to time, no matter what we're studying, that we focus again on all that is bound up in Christ.
In order to do that, I want you to turn in your Bible to Colossians chapter 2...Colossians chapter 2, that wonderful epistle of Paul. And I want to call your attention to verse 10, if I might, the first part of the verse, just one statement. And we'll use that as the initial point to discuss this particular portion of Scripture.
Paul writing in Colossians 2:10 says, "And you are complete in Him." That means exactly what it says...the sufficiency of Christ. You are, from a spiritual viewpoint, complete in Him. The surpassing theme of the New Testament is distilled and articulated in that phrase. Everything from Matthew to Revelation speaks to the issue of the sufficiency of Jesus Christ.
In 1 Corinthians chapter 1 and verse 30, the Apostle Paul also writing, says that in Christ we have all wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption. In 2 Corinthians 12:9 it says, "My grace," that is the grace of God in Christ, "is sufficient for you." In Ephesians 1:3 it says that we have in Christ been blessed with all spiritual blessings in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus. And Hebrews 10:14 says, "By one offering He has perfected forever them that are His, or sanctified forever them that are His."
So, all of these scriptures speak to the matter of the total sufficiency of Jesus Christ for every need, spiritually speaking, in time and eternity. And no clearer a statement exists than that of Colossians 2:10, you are complete in Him. Having the Lord Jesus Christ is to have everything needed in spiritual life for time and eternity. To have Him is to have everything. Not to have Him is to have absolutely nothing at all. All joy, peace, meaning, value, purpose, hope, fulfillment in life now and forever is bound up in Christ. And when a person receives Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, they enter in to an all‑sufficient relationship with an all‑sufficient Christ.
You say, "Is anybody debating that? They certainly are. We live in a time, in a day when there is great doubt cast upon the sufficiency of Jesus Christ. When Jesus Christ appears to be something you add to what you already have, or something you get in order to add to.
I remember some years ago when I was asked to come down to a Hollywood hotel to speak to a group of actors and actresses, someone had arranged a meeting and asked me to come and give them the gospel. I went into a room in the hotel where they were all seated. It was kind of a different environment for me. There were some who were drinking cocktails and so forth, and some who were smoking and there I was with my Bible prepared to preach. And I was convinced this was indeed the right audience for me to speak to because they didn't know the Lord. And I launched into the gospel and I presented the gospel for about 45 minutes and called for faith in Christ.
A young man came to me afterwards, immediately walking up to the front, shook my hand. He was a very handsome man from India. He was a young actor who had come over here to Hollywood to make it. And he said to me, "Your speech was fascinating and compelling." And he said, "I want Jesus Christ in my life." I was thrilled. I said, "Well, let's go over in this little side room," and we did. And he said, "I want to tell you, I'm a Muslim, I've been a Muslim all my life. But...he said...I want to have Christ."
Well I was thrilled. In my ministry I had never had the privilege of leading a Muslim to Christ, nor did I understand that a Muslim might respond to one hearing of the gospel in that way. So I was overwhelmed. And I went through a little more of the detail of opening one's heart to Christ and then I said, "Let's pray." And we got down on our knees and two little chairs and we prayed and he invited the Lord Jesus Christ to come into his life and I prayed and when our prayers were done and he stood up, I was so thrilled and he shook my hand and he said, "Now isn't that wonderful? I have two gods, Jesus and Mohammed."
And I said, "Ah, that's not how it works. You don't add Jesus to what you already have. And you don't having Jesus add anything to Him."
Do you remember that Jesus said, "A man found a treasure hidden in a field and sold everything he had to buy the treasure?" And a man found a pearl of great price and sold everything he had to buy that one pearl? And don't we realize that because of the sufficiency of Christ we give up all things that we may have one and that is Christ? It's an exchange of all that I am and all that I have for all that He is.
But that is not a popular thing. In the day in which we live now, I don't see in our country aggressive hate against Christ, I don't see the great majority of people denying the existence of Christ or even the quote/unquote "goodness of Christ" as a historical person. And there are a lot of people who want to use the name of Christ and might even say they believe in Jesus Christ, but it's inevitably Christ plus something. It might be Christ plus human intellect, or philosophy, or sociology, or mystical experience, or Christ plus ritual or ceremony, self‑denial. Christ plus a lot of things, but not Christ plus nothing, not Christ all‑sufficient, not total completeness in Christ, not absolute abandonment of my life to Christ. That's what we want to talk about.
Paul writes to the Colossians because they were being intimidated. They were being intimidated by people who were telling them that Christ was not sufficient, Christ was not adequate, Christ was not enough. They needed to have rationalism. It was Christ plus intellectualism, Christ plus philosophy, it was Christ plus ceremonies and laws and rules and rituals. And it was Christ plus mystical experiences and encounters with angels. And it was Christ plus self‑denial, self‑abnegation, self‑affliction, self‑mutilation. They were very intimidated. So Paul writes this epistle to them to tell them it's Christ plus nothing and to show the lie of these heresies.
The great beginning of his argument is in chapter 1 verse 14 where Paul says, "In whom...that is in Christ, referred to as His dear Son in verse 13...in whom we have redemption through His blood, even the forgiveness of sins, who is the image of the invisible God, the prototokos of all creation, that is the supreme one of all those ever created." And, of course, in His physical body there was creation. "For by Him were all things created that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones or dominions, or principalities or powers, all things were created by Him and for Him and He is before all things and by Him all things consist." Do you notice all the uses of the word all? The sufficiency of Christ, He's the head of the body of the church who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead that in all things He might have the preeminence, for it pleased the Father that in Him should all fullness dwell. All...all...all...all...all is in Christ.
Chapter 2 verse 3, "In whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge." Chapter 2 verse 9, "For in Him dwells all the fullness of the godhead bodily and you are complete in Him who is head of all principality and power." Little wonder in chapter 3 verse 4 he says, "Christ who is our life." He is our life. He's not part of our life. He's not the start of our life. He's not the capstone of our life. He is our life.
Colossians were being told that they needed something more than just Jesus Christ to know God, something more than just Jesus Christ to be whole people, something more than just Jesus Christ to defeat the powers of sin, the powers of the demon world, something more than just Jesus Christ to have salvation, something more than just Jesus Christ to have true spirituality. Christ was not sufficient. And so, Paul just loads his gun with a whole lot of alls and starts firing them at them. The all sufficient Christ.
It's well that we focus on that as we look at this second chapter. The lack of sufficiency in Christ, according to these heretics, could be made up by four things: rationalism, legalism, mysticism, or asceticism....rationalism, legalism, mysticism or asceticism. Rationalism means human wisdom, philosophy. Legalism means ceremony, ritual, religious routine. Mysticism means supernatural experiences, paranormal experiences, visions. And asceticism means physical self‑denial. And the particular heresy in Colossae was saying that all of these things are necessary for complete spiritual life and for a right relationship to God. Christ is not sufficient. It is one of the deceptive ploys of Satan, not to deny outwardly the person of Christ, not to attack overtly the person of Christ, but simply to try to demonstrate that Christ is not enough, that He's insufficient.
Let's look at these four areas. First of all, in verse 8 the Apostle Paul answers those who say it's Christ plus rationalism...Christ plus your mind...Christ plus human reason...Christ plus philosophy. Verse 8 says, "Keep on being aware," it's a present tense, always be alert to the fact, "beware lest any man spoil you." Sulagogeo means to carry off booty, kidnap you, plunder you, seduce you, haul you away as a captive to their thinking. Don't let anybody take you captive through philosophy, and it can be translated, which is vain deceit. Philosophy, even vain deceit, it is deceitful, it is useless, philosophy. What is philosophy? Wisdom of man, study of man's wisdom.
I took a lot of philosophy in college and I look back particularly to a course I took in advance European philosophy. And as I was taking that class, I was amazed because the basic attitude of the academic environment toward philosophers is that they are the utter elite of mankind, that they are the scintillating intellects of the world and that the rest of us are nothing but peons down on some mean level who cannot grasp these great concepts. And so there's a certain sense in which everybody studying philosophy is intimidated right out of their socks by the mental capabilities of philosophers. The first thing that intimidates you is that you really don't understand what they're talking about...until you realize that they didn't either, you're going to be intimidated.
But we are a world that gives great great attention to the mind, to the intellect. And we are all often intimidated by that as if simple faith in Jesus Christ is not enough. There's something in philosophy and psychology and something in human reason that embellishes Christ. That, my dear friends, is liberal theology. To the liberals, they don't deny Christ, it's just that Christ, those who believe only in Christ are sort of peabrains, you know, anti‑intellectual. They laugh at us because of the simplicity of our faith that Jesus Christ is all sufficient for all the spiritual needs of every man and woman, both in time and eternity. And they purvey the idea that Christ is apart but beyond that there's this endless verbosity about life and truth and morality and solutions to man's dilemmas that comes out of their brains that's supposed to be erudite and all solving.
It's interesting to me, I was thinking about this as I was preparing for today, that we don't even have much classic philosophy left to speak of...most classic philosophy is in the past and is rehashed and reread. Our philosophers today are the media people. They're the ones articulating the solution to the human problem today. And they're anything but classic philosophers. Those are the kind of philosophers we have today. It's the body, body, body, body, body. It's feel good, feel good, feel good, feel good time so nobody is cognitive. We're not producing philosophers who are spinning off musings out of their mind, we live in the pragmatic body cult era when all we want to know is about feeling. So we have a raft of philosophers who are giving man a raison d'etre, a reason to be in terms of how they feel and expressing their passions and lusts and desires, and that's the new philosophy. And so, of course, Christ can't intrude on that. You can have Christ, but if you really want to live it up, you've got to have this, too.
It's just that always man is convoluting truth, the simple truth of Christ by adding his own reasonings. And the reasoning of man is bankrupt of any truth morally, any truth spiritually. Purveyors of human wisdom have been around since the beginning and they're here today and they want us to believe that Christ is not enough. And if you have this simple childlike faith that embraces Christ, you're some kind of mindless person, some kind of anti‑intellectual person, common, mean, unsophisticated. That's very intimidating. That comes against young people in the educational environment all the time. That comes at the seminary level all the time. One of the things I'm so excited about in the Master's Seminary is that we are committed that our men are going to be men of God who are men totally trained in the Word of God and the world can sit out there and say we're anti‑ intellectual if they'd like, we don't really mind. They can say whatever they want, we're going to be true to the Word of God. And that's under attack.
So, look at verse 8. Paul says, "Beware lest any man carry you off captive with some human reasoning that is nothing more than vain deceit, or an empty lie, or an utter delusion, after the tradition of men, that is a result of the inadequate human thinking process, after the rudiments of the world." Rudiments mean the basic elements of learning, the ABCs. What he's really saying, it's nothing more than human baby talk. We think that the world's philosophers and the world's thinkers and these people articulating all of the answers to all of man's needs are the bright and the brilliant and the surpassing and the highest level and the ones who are really the elite. And the fact is he says they're the ones who are messing with the ABCs, stuff that is so basic and so rudimentary that it isn't even adequate for adults. The truth of the matter is, you and I possess the knowledge of God which is infinitely higher than the knowledge of man, and at best, all that man can come up with his wisdom is foolishness, right? First Corinthians 1.
Rather than advancing human wisdom, rather than advancing the mind, wordly philosophy regresses away from mature truth to the infantile babblings of little infants, poverty opinions of puny minds that go nowhere near the ultimate truth of God which is the highest and surpassing of all truth which believers have already attained in Christ. The great incomprehensible mind of Christ is revealed to us in the Word of God and through the Spirit of God, not because we're brilliant but because we believe. So when somebody comes along and says, "Well, Christ is a good starting point but you need more than that, you need human reason and human solutions and philosophy," that's not an advanced perspective, that's not a more deep and profound insight, it's just the opposite, it's infantile. It goes backwards. Why do you want to be captive to baby talk when you can ascend to the profound truth of God? You see? "For in Him," verse 9 says, "dwells all the fullness, all the pleroma of the godhead, all the pleroma of God dwells in Christ bodily in the incarnation." It was all there. The amazing God‑Man, and you, verse 10, are complete in Him. Isn't that marvelous? All the pleroma of God is in Christ and Christ is in you and you are complete in that. What can human wisdom about meaning add to that? What can human wisdom about morality add to that? What can human wisdom about purpose add to that? What can human wisdom about life, love, death, what can human wisdom about anything add to that? What lack in their spiritual life do Christians need help with from the world? None.
So, don't believe for any moment that when you come and receive Jesus Christ that's some kind of starting point and you've got to accumulate a whole bunch of other stuff out of the world to round out your life. From the spiritual dimension, He is all we need, He is utterly sufficient, who is...it says in verse 10...the head of all principality and power, all the highest beings created. Those are names of angels. He is over all of them. His knowledge surpasses human knowledge, it surpasses supernatural knowledge and the best that men can do is infantile.
You want to know the truth, folks? We are the elite of the world intellectually. We have the mind of Christ, right? Who know God in Christ. We know the truth. I know the truth about values, I know the truth about morality. I know the truth from the standpoint of life. I know the truth from the standpoint of death. I know what is right. I know what is wrong. I know what makes people happy, what makes them sad. I know where joy is found, peace is found, hope is found, truth is found, and so do you, right? And you didn't get that by getting a Ph.D. You got it by receiving Christ. It's all available to you because Christ comes to us in His person and He comes to us through His Word and by His Spirit, and the combination is to have the wisdom of God. Christ is made unto us, 1 Corinthians 1:30, wisdom...wisdom. He's all we need in the spiritual sense. I'm not going to say that being a Christian is going to effect you in every dimension of life, but in the spiritual dimension, He's all we need. He provides, verse 11 and 12 say, He provides complete salvation. We are circumcised, that is there's a cleansing, symbolized in circumcision, but not with hands. In other words, not a physical circumcision, but a putting off of the body of the sins of the flesh.
In other words, Christ comes to us and takes away the sins of the flesh. We're delivered from them. How? By being immersed with Him into His own death and resurrection, verse 12 says. Buried with Him in baptism in which you're risen through the faith of the operation of God who has raised Him from the dead. When you believe in Christ you're placed into His death and resurrection, as you know, and through that death and that new life comes complete salvation. Transformation from death to life. You're alive to God. You understand God. You hear His voice. You know what He says.
The natural man doesn't. The natural man doesn't understand the things of God. He's a corpse. You can scream at a corpse till you're blue in the face, he won't hear. You give him life and he'll hear. God has given us life and we hear His voice and we understand what He says. Complete salvation, complete forgiveness in verses 13 and 14. Even though we were dead in sins and uncircumcision of flesh, He made us alive together with Him, that is with Christ, having forgiven you all trespasses. And then verse 14, one of the great verses in all the epistles, blotting out, the word means to erase or wipe off. In those days when a scribe wrote he wrote on papyrus which was made from reeds, paper made from reeds, or he wrote on velum which was made from animal skin. The ink didn't have acid so when he wrote the ink would sit right on top of the velum or on top of the papyrus. And if he wanted to use it again he could take something wet and wipe it off and reuse it because it was costly. And the picture here is of a wiping off. And what was wiped off? The handwriting of laws that was against us, which was contrary to us, He took it out of the way, nailing it to His cross.
The picture is very vivid. There was a list of crimes that was put on the cross of a crucified victim that showed everybody why he was crucified. Paul says the list of crimes that nailed Jesus to the cross were not His crimes, but whose? Ours. And the idea here is a self‑signed, self‑confessed debt of sin was nailed to the cross, was the list of crimes for which He died. And by His death He erased that list. So we have in Christ complete salvation, complete forgiveness.
And then he says in verse 15, complete victory because He spoiled, conquered, principalities and powers, meaning demon hosts, made a show of them openly. I believe He descended into the lower parts and down there proclaimed His triumph over them. He showed the demons on earth and the demons in the pit bound that He had won the victory openly, triumphing over them in His death. So when we receive Christ, we receive complete salvation. That is deliverance from the flesh and the power of sin and some day the presence of sin. We receive complete forgiveness for all of the things that we've done to violate the law of God. And we receive complete victory over the powers of the demon world, the fallen world, the hosts of hell. That's sufficiency.
Human philosophy adds nothing to that. Human reason adds nothing to that. Human sociology, psychology, philosophy add nothing to that. And we must realize that whereas man may teach us some things helpful about life in this world, they offer nothing to make up some lack of Christ. Christ is sufficient to make us wise so that John says we need not that any man should teach us. Human wisdom has no application to our spiritual life.
Secondly, the attack comes from legalism, not just rationalism. Paul says in verse 16, "Don't let anyone therefore condemn you," the word condemn rather than judge gives the idea, "don't let anyone therefore condemn you in food or in drink or in respect of a feastday or of the new moon or of a sabbath day which are a shadow of things to come, but the body or the reality that casts the shadow is Christ."
Now this is the religion of human achievement again through legalism. There are people who want us to believe that you believe in Christ...yes, but you do this, you do this, you do this, you do this...you go through all these rituals and Christ plus nothing won't get you there, it's Christ plus legalism. Legalism is just a word that means keeping rules and laws and outward ceremonies to gain favor with God.
I remember on a Sunday night a young man came here after I preached and spoke to me and told me this personal testimony. He was a jazz drummer and he had gone on that very morning, Sunday morning, to his Catholic Church. And he had felt tremendous guilt over sins. And as a Catholic he felt the way to get relief from guilt was to go to confession. And so he went and asked that a priest would go in the booth and hear his confession. And he confessed all of his sins. And he said, "I want to be delivered from the guilt of these." And the priest said, "Take your beads," and I think it was the number 35, "go say 35 Hail Marys."
So he went over to the altar and he said to me, "I said several Hail Marys, and I stood up and I took my beads and I threw them as hard as I could and as far as I could across the church and walked out." Somehow in the wonderful providence of God, he found his way to the service here on that Sunday night, heard the message of Jesus Christ and was wonderfully saved. And he said to me, he said, "I knew that all of that was doing nothing to deal with the guilt of my sin." It wasn't that he didn't believe in Christ, it was that he was told that Christ was not enough, that you couldn't just expect Christ to forgive your sin, you had to do something, something religious. This is so prominent in ceremonial ritualistic systems, in self‑righteous works systems. People who would believe in Christ and then try to earn their way into the kingdom.
With the Jews, of course, it had to do with the Old Testament. They had dietary laws, food and drink laws. But by now in the new covenant with the coming of Christ those laws were set aside. You say, "Well what were those laws for in the first place?" Well, the dietary laws and the feast laws and the ceremonies of Israel were symbols, they weren't spiritual realities, they were simply illustrations of a spiritual truth. But primarily, I just want you to know, that God gave them all those unique living habits for the primary reason to make their life so unusual, their diet so unusual, their behavior so unusual that it was difficult for them to interact with the pagan nations around them. You have to remember that when God put His people in the land, they were an island in the midst of a cess pool of paganism. They had invaded pagan territory. And the fear, of course, was that their purity would be totally destroyed by the encroaching paganism, like planting a delicate flower in the midst of a weed field.
And so, God built insulation around them in dietary laws and in behavioral laws that made it almost impossible for them to interact with other people on a social level, to protect them. And those were symbols, symbols of spiritual things. They were opportunities for obedience to God. But there came a time when God set all of those symbols aside in the coming of Jesus Christ. And in Mark 7 is a monumental statement, "Nothing going into the mouth of a man defiles the man." That is a shocking statement, Mark 7:14 and 15. Because the Jews had always believed that there were certain things going in that did defile and Jesus there is saying it's a new day, folks, defilement doesn't come dietarily anymore. And in Acts 10 He says to Peter, "Rise, Peter, kill and eat," and there's a whole lot of unclean animals on a sheet in his vision, "and don't you ever call anymore unclean what God has now sanctified." And here comes the culmination of it, "Don't let anybody condemn you because of your diet, because you don't keep a feastday, because you don't celebrate a new moon, because you don't observe the sabbath, those were a shadow, the reality is now here." And the reality is faith in Christ. The reality is Christ.
Don't let anybody tell you it's Christ plus your beads, Chri