Gooding, David: 3 - The Cosmic Powers and You

We come tonight to the end of our short study of uh three sessions on the Epistle to the Colossians. Not to the end of the meetings, as you have heard, for there is another session here tomorrow evening and one on Sunday afternoon. But for these three sessions, we have been following certain themes in the Epistle to the Colossians. We come to the third and last of them this evening, and to introduce ourselves to the subject, let's read from that epistle, the epistle of Paul to the Colossians, beginning in chapter two and verse 1. For I would have you know how greatly I strive for you, and for them at Laodicea, and for as many as not have not seen my face in the flesh, that their hearts may be comforted, they being knit together in love and unto all riches of the full assurance of understanding, that they may know the mystery of God, even Christ, in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden. This I say, that no one may delude you with persuasiveness of speech. For though I am absent in the flesh, yet am I with you in the spirit, joying and beholding your order and the steadfastness of your faith in Christ. As therefore you received Christ Jesus the Lord, walk in him, rooted and builded up in him, and established in your faith, even as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. Take heed, lest there shall be any one that makes spoil of you through his philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. For in him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily, and in him you are made full, who is the head of all principality and power, in whom you were also circumcised with a circumcision not made with hands, in the putting off of the body of the flesh, in the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, wherein you were also raised with him through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead. And you, being dead through your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, you, I say, did he make alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, having blotted out the bond written in ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and he hath taken it out of the way, nailing it to the cross. Having put off from himself the principalities and powers, he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it. Let no man therefore judge you in meat or in drink or in respect of a feast day or a new moon or a Sabbath day, which are a shadow of the things to come, but the body is Christ's. Let no man rob you of your prize by a voluntary humility and worshiping of the angels, dwelling in the things which he has seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind, and not holding fast the head from whom all the body being supplied and knit together through the joints and the bands, increaseth with the increase of God. If you died with Christ from the rudiments of the world, why, as though living in the world, do you subject yourselves to ordinances? Handle not, nor taste, nor touch, all which things are to perish with the using after the precepts and doctrines of men, which things indeed have a show of wisdom in will worship and humility and severity to the body, but are not of any value and contribute, in fact, to the indulgence of the flesh. If then you were raised together with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is seated on the right hand of God. Set your mind on the things that are above, and not on the things that are upon the earth. For you died, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall you also with him be manifested in glory. And may God give us good understanding of his word. Now, when we broke off our study on the previous evening, we were thinking together of the hope of glory, and we were learning again to distinguish two things in our minds that ought always to be kept carefully separate. The one is the great time when our blessed Lord Jesus shall present every believer before the presence of God with exceeding joy, and present them without blemish and without charge. We emphasize to ourselves that every believer on that occasion, every genuine believer, shall be presented without charge before God. For who can lay anything, as Paul would say, to the charge of God's elect? That on the one hand, that we were reminding ourselves how important it is to distinguish between that and what Paul is talking of at the end of chapter one, his desire to present every believer before God, fully grown, mature, perfect. And we reminded ourselves again that while every believer will be presented by Christ before the Father without charge, it is impossible, alas, to think that every believer shall be presented fully mature and perfect, fully grown. Alas, some of us, by the time we're called to heaven's glory, will not have grown, will not be so mature as we might have been. Hence, Paul began to talk to us about the tremendous and earnest struggle that he had in his day for every single believer of whom he was aware. And now he begins to talk to us in chapter two in full earnest of this wonderful topic, the hope of glory, the hope of being presented fully mature, fully grown, and spiritually adult. That is to be our topic this evening. What is the pathway? What are the resources? By what power have we any hope of making progress to full Christian maturity? And the first thing we should notice, it seems to me, is the earnestness with which Paul begins chapter two of his epistle, and the way he is concerned in the opening verses to make sure that he buttresses and strengthens the confidence of every believer to whom he writes, and guards against the possibility of discouragement and cynicism setting in. I want you to know, he says, what a great struggle I have for you, and even for those believers that have not seen my face in the flesh, that your hearts may be encouraged. Yes, to know that the great apostle Paul was striving for them would surely fire their hearts with courage and encouragement. And even to read his letter tonight and hear and feel the throb of his heart and his spiritual desire and his prayers, we too might take courage. We're reading his letter. He wrote it in white hot fervor for our souls, hoping that we too, when the time came, would be presented fully grown and spiritually adult. And he wants us to be saved from any discouragement and cynicism, which tells us this shortly at the very beginning, that the path to spiritual maturity is not necessarily going to be pleasant and joyful along every stretch of the road. Surely there will come many times when we feel like shouting, ah, hallelujahs of triumph for the progress we have made. But you may lay it to your heart that there will come other times when your chief difficulty to that you are called upon to face is the temptation to grievous discouragement and loss of nerve and abandonment of hope, with a feeling that you are fast getting nowhere at all, even if you are not going backwards. That, my brothers and sisters, in the v- is in the very nature of the course upon which we are set by the Savior himself. We shall not, one of these days, wake up one Monday morning and say to ourselves, as, uh, the light dawns upon us for another week, goodness me, I feel different this morning. I feel sort of peculiar. Whatever has happened to me? Oh, I know, I think, what it is. I have become holy overnight. No, you'll never wake up like that. There are no quick, sudden routes to spiritual maturity any more than there is in nature any quick, sudden route to having ripe mata- v- v- potatoes or ripe bananas. Nature will take its course, and so will our spiritual life take its course. Moreover, of course, if we are to be made holy, it will involve from time to time that God shall bring us into circumstances and experiences that reveal to us our hitherto hidden weaknesses and failings, so that we may come to face them and repent of them and seek the Lord's grace to overcome them. We shall not normally get the victory over sin without knowing it. We shall have to be exposed to ourselves. God, you know, has given us a map of this road in the Old Testament, in the story of how he took Israel after they were delivered from Egypt towards their great inheritance in Canaan. And the map is given us for our encouragement, of course. When Israel recently come from deliverance from Pharaoh, stood on the further bank of the Red Sea, they sang their praise to God. Oh, what a wonderful experience it was. The horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea, and such was the gratitude and wonder at their deliverance that they sang as if their little hearts would break. And in those moments, such was their spiritual elation that they talked not only of the fact that they had been delivered out of Egypt, but they talked as if their entry into the Promised Land would be now in the next day or two. Thou has brought us out, they said, and thou has brought us in. It seemed to them as if tomorrow almost that they would be at their goal. And I expect all of us have known those times of spiritual elation, have we not? When our hearts have surveyed the wonders of God's grace, the tyrannies that he has broken in our lives, and our hearts have welled up, and it seemed to us as though heaven were but an inch or two above our heads. And then what happened? Well, two or three months down the road, towards Canaan, it was a very different story, wasn't it? For they discovered to their alarm that God wasn't what they thought he was. They'd imagined that the road to Canaan would be triumph after triumph, after triumph, after triumph, with marvels of God's surprise meeting them at every turn in the road. They found instead that very often the water ran out, and sometimes the food was scarce, and all kinds of doubts began to rise in their hearts about God himself. Was this God so wonderful as Moses had said? Was this God so loving as initially they had thought? All kinds of murmurs began to arise in their hearts as they discovered that God was different from what they thought he was. Then in those circumstances, they made another discovery, did they not? They discovered that they were different from what they thought they were too. They weren't through and through the marvelously saintly people that they had imagined. And when circumstances came around, they too could murmur and complain and doubt the love of God and rebel against his word. If you say, why did God do it? Well, he explained later on to the Israelites why he had treated them so. He said, I led you through the wilderness, and I caused you to hunger, and I humbled you, that I might know what was in your heart. You'll say there's no other way to be holy, is there? From time to time, as we can bear it, God has to make us face what is in our hearts. If need be, we shall cry out with Paul, even in his converted days, oh wretched man that I am, the good I would do, I don't do, and the evil I wouldn't do, that I go and do. We discover what God has known all the time, what exactly we are like. And it can be an emotionally and spiritually shattering thing for a believer in midlife, when the idealism of youth has died down and the realities of life begin to creep in upon him or her. It can be a shattering experience to find that in midlife one is still dogged by weaknesses that have not been overcome. That one is dogged by weaknesses that one never knew were there. Hence, therefore, the wisdom of the Apostle Paul, as he begins this great chapter on the road towards spiritual maturity, to say to his fellow believers, now the first thing I want you to get hold of is this, I'm having a tremendous struggle for you so that your hearts may be encouraged. Knit together in love. Oh, pray God that you don't let yourself be discouraged by what you find. God has known about it all the way along, and God has the answer. Courage up, my brother. Courage, my sister. If you are honest with God, then he that has begun the good work in you will continue that good work until the day of Jesus Christ. You being knit together in love, oh, pray remember it, that God loved you knowing the very worst about you. It is love that allows you the difficulties in the road. When he allows you to discover the evil of your heart, it is not because he loves to shame you and expose you. It is his love that digs it out, that you may be helped to repent of it and overcome it and be freed from it. That is the situation. And says Paul, I strive for you that you may know the mystery of God, even Christ, in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden. There are resources. They are, you notice, hidden. But there are resources, treasures, Paul calls them, of wisdom and knowledge. They are hidden in Christ, and God has the answer to them. What lovely words they are. I love the metaphorical language. Paul doesn't say, you know, in Christ there is a rule book that if only you would study the rules, you would know how you ought to behave. He says that hidden in Christ is all the wealth of wisdom and knowledge. It is psychologically and spiritually exceedingly important that God maintain in us a sense of the superabundant wealth that there is for us in Christ. How easy it is, isn't it, for us to lose the sense of that divine wonder and wealth in Christ. And Christianity, uh, comes down to merely a how-to concern, how to do this and how to do that, like some of those practical books you can get for the supermarket, do-it-yourselfism. It's merely a book of rules and regulations. And if it becomes so with us, we lose one of the great motivating sources of power in a Christian's life, the sense of the wonder of the world. The very words in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. My, oh my, if one of these days you discovered under the lawn of your garden an Australian gold mine and diamonds galore, I think I see even you, sir, with your hard-hearted business sense of a night time when no one was looking, putting your hands through the casket and letting your diamonds drip through the fingers and funneling the gold, you know, of course you're not a miser, of course not, but the sheer fun of putting your hand through the treasure. Oh, my dear believer, God meant his book to be like that. How do you regard his book? As a host of rules and regulations like the income tax inspectors regulations that you read because you have to, to keep the right side of the law? Or do you really find it in your heart, a veritable mine of treasure, and you love every five minutes you can get to spare, running your hands and the fingers of your mind through the incalculable treasure that there is in Christ? Or if I seem to talk double Dutch to you, if you don't find Holy Scripture like that, if you don't find the Son of God like that, pray ask God's spirit to enlighten you, for you're losing the battle already. If Christ doesn't appear to you a source of absolutely entrancing spiritual wealth that is there to be explored. There are resources. There is power. And in the verses that follow, Paul is going to talk to us of our blessed Lord Jesus, who, being the head of all principality and power, is at our disposal in the road towards spiritual mater- m- maturity. All the traces of wisdom and knowledge are hidden. We'll say, but Colossians is such heavy stuff. Ah. Let's be practical, you'll say. Very good. Suppose, my dear fellow believer, you had been moved by the plight of some third world country who had to go miles and miles and miles to the relief store of food that had come in and carry the sacks of corn upon their backs to their homes. And you had been moved to compassion, and you said to yourself, what they need is a lorry, you see, or a truck, whatever you call it here in this beautiful country. So the proud day came when the plane touched down and the transport plane opened its great nose, and you took the brake off the lorry and let it, uh, glide down the ramp, and there before the astonished eyes of the chief was your beautiful lorry. There you are, you say, my man, uh, I want to give it to you and to your people to make life easy for you, so that you shall be able to go and get the supplies of corn you need. And there, my good man, are the keys. God bless you. And you hop on your plane and go back. And five years later, you come to see how they're getting on, and to your surprise, you can't see the lorry anywhere, will they? And you get round in the end to asking, and and how did you find a lorry? And you're met with glum faces. Well, we put it round the corner there, and you notice the thing is dilapidated and overgrown with weeds, and you you say, aren't you using it? Well, no, they said, to be honest, we're not, you know. We found it a, a bit of a burden. It was bad enough, you know, carrying the corn on our back, but when we loaded it on the lorry and we had to push the lorry, you see, uh, it was too much for our men. It was too heavy going, you see. What do you mean you had to push the lorry? Well, to push it, to get it home when the corn was loaded. Yes, but you don't have to put them, push a lorry. It's got an engine in it. And they say, what do you mean by an engine? And you lift the lid, whatever you call it here, we call it the bonnet, and you say, that thing in there, that's an engine, my boy. And they say, engine? Well, that's the heavy stuff we thought, you see, and we were going to cut it out to make it lighter for us to push. You say, but that's a nonsense, my dear good folks. What do you call that heavy stuff? It's the actual engine. If you knew how to turn it on, the thing would pulsate with power, and it would have pulled the load for you. So here you may call it heavy stuff if you like, about the blessed Lord who is the head of principality and power. This is the engine. This is the powerhouse. God's provision for us, if only we could understand it. The power available to lead us to spiritual maturity. But then, of course, we must be aware of another danger. If it is in our hearts to become spiritually mature, we shall not be left long alone by his satanic majesty. One of his tricks will be that if he can't make us worldly and turn us aside by that means, he will try the opposite tactics and lead us astray by our very desire to be holy. He tried that with the Lord Jesus, didn't he, in the temptations. He came to our blessed Lord in the first temptation and said, if you are the Son of God, make these stones bread. Our Lord didn't deny that he was the Son of God. Of course, he was the Son of God. He didn't deny that he had the power. He had the power to make the stones bread, but he declined to use the power and said instead, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. His was to be a life of complete dependence on his father. And when the devil saw he couldn't win that way round and tip our Lord over into worldliness and the desire of the flesh, then he tried the opposite tactic, didn't he? And came to our blessed Lord, and if I may paraphrase him, said, now I recognize that you are a very holy man, of course. Marvelous that you've set yourself to a life of dependence upon God. You know, there are very few around here like that. This is absolutely marvelous. Total dependence on the God, on God. Oh, I do admire that. Now come, why not take another step in dependence upon God, you know? And he brought him up to the temple pinnacle and said, now look here, cast yourself over, young man, show your dependence upon God, step out in faith. Any Christian man may well have been tempted to do it, supposing that this was a way of demonstrating dependence upon God. But our blessed Lord, of course, saw through the, the, the deceit of it, the hellish sophistication of the deceit. Instead of being a stepping forth on faith, it would have been a question of tempting the Lord. For the prior question to be asked was, and has God told me to cast myself down off the temple? And if he hasn't, then why should I do it? I mustn't take a step that then involves God to come after me and carry me in a way that he was never intending that I should do in the first place. And so it is with us, isn't it? If Satan cannot get us astray by worldliness, then he will attempt to take us astray by our very desire to be holy. And what he often will do is to hold out temptingly in front of us all kinds of recipes for deepening the spiritual life that seem to be good, but are in fact bogus. And that is to be one of the burdens of this chapter, isn't it? Here Paul is to be found warning his fellow believers against bogus recipes for the deepening of the spiritual life. That is why, of course, in this second chapter, the word wisdom now begins to reoccur. Look at it again, just clo- cast your eye down the page. Chapter two and verse three: of Christ, it is said, in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden. But verse eight says, take heed lest there be any one that maketh spoil of you through his philosophy, which is Greek for love of wisdom. That is a false wisdom. And verse twenty three, again at the end of the chapter in the last paragraph, which things have indeed a show of wisdom, but in actual fact are no use whatsoever, says Paul. True wisdom then, against bogus wisdom. True recipes for the development of spiritual life as distinct from bogus recipes for the development of spiritual life. And what do we mean by wisdom? Well, I suppose wisdom could have many descriptions, but one important one is this: wisdom is shown by choosing the proper means by which to attain your desired goal. Yes? So the, uh, carpenter comes, he wants to s- to cut a lo- lo- lo- a piece of timber. Well, now his wisdom will be shown in the tools he uses, won't it? It's no good taking a knife and fork to cut a piece of timber, now, is it? That would be foolish. You'd have a stab at it, but how could you possibly succeed? No, true wisdom and skill will be found in choosing the proper tool, the proper means to attain the end that you desire to attain. And here the end we want to attain is spiritual maturity, spiritual adulthood, full Christian growth, full development of our spiritual potential. Therefore, we shall need wisdom to use the proper tools and resources and not be deceived into using or trying to use false recipes for developing the spiritual life. Look at, uh, four, if you will, four false recipes that Paul talks of here. The first is in verse eight, as you'll see. Take heed, lest there shall be anyone that makes spoil of you through his philosophy. Bogus recipe, number 1. Look at verse sixteen: Let no man therefore judge you in meat or in drink or in respect of a feast day or a new moon or a Sabbath day. Bogus recipe number two: religious observances. Bogus recipe number three comes in verse eighteen: Let no man rob you of your prize by voluntary humility and worshiping of the angels, dwelling in the things which he has seen. The bogus recipe number three is the practice and inducement of visions and out-of-the-body experiences. And bogus recipe number four is in verse twenty three, which things have a show of wisdom in will worship and humility and severity to the body, the kind of things that the Greeks called asceticism, a kind of a rigorous control of the body by beating the body black and blue, and thus subduing it or attempting to subdue it psychologically and physically. Four false recipes. We are therefore to consider them briefly tonight, and at first, as we do so, we shall find that they are perhaps a little bit strange and remote. I trust when we're finished, we shall see how they are relevant to us in our modern age. But then again, as we consider the bogus, uh, recipes, we shall have to be careful, lest we put a wrong emphasis on what Paul is saying. The first of the false recipes is philosophy and vain deceit after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. For in Christ dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. And you see the, the, the distinction he's making, don't you, and the contrast. The traditions of men on the one side and the fullness of the Godhead on the other side. This is the contrast that we have to get over. Man's idea on the one side, God's idea on the other side. Man's weak and puny thought on the one side, the fullness of Godhead on the other side. So now then, philosophy, the love of wisdom is what the Greek word means. And we must be careful, mustn't we? I have known situations when God's people have said and given the impression that to be a spiritual Christian, you don't need ordinary education. And then they've gone on to say that education is a bad thing, and given the impression that the more ignorant you are, the more spiritual you are likely to be. And my brethren, I must tell you that that is quite false. We are to love the Lord our God with all the thinking powers we possess. And ordinary straightforward philosophy, if it keeps to its proper field, is a very good, useful, and healthy thing, is it not? It is bogus philosophy that Paul is hitting out against. We'll say philosophy in Europe, at least, began with the Greeks, and all of us are highly indebted to the Greeks for their Greek philosophy, are we not? They began, did the Greeks, in their philosophy, to begin to ask questions about what the world is made of. And thus we're delivered from a lot of stupid idolatry. Whereas people thought the moon was a goddess, the Greeks came to see that the moon was simply a lump of old rock. And they found out by, by their philosophical thinking. The Greeks it was that discovered in the fourth century BC, if not earlier, that the world is made up of atoms, through what is called their natural philosophy. And all of us today are grateful, aren't we, for their discovery. It's been much refined since, but every person that has to go into hospital and receive radium treatment might thank God for the Greeks who were the first to consider the possibility that the universe is made up of atoms. Nothing wrong in that is it. And we thank God for every educational facility to learn our science still. The Greeks were not, uh, content simply to ask questions about science. They ask questions about life. What is life for? What is man's chief goal in life? They called it, to use a Latin phrase, they called it our summum bonum. They said to themselves, now what is life's chief goal that we ought to be aiming at as the chief objective in our lives, you'll see. And they said, well, whatever it is, it must be an end in itself and not simply a means to some other end. And what they meant was this, you'll see. Ask, uh, Miss- Mr. Jones, if you like, you'll see. Any Mr. Jones. Come, Mister Jones. Mm. Why do you go to work, Mister Jones? Oh, Mister Jones will say, don't be silly, I have to go to work because I have to get the food to eat. Oh, I see, yes. Uh, and why do you need food to eat? He'll say, you dunderhead, you. Isn't it obvious I need the food to eat so that I can become strong? And why do you need to fo- to become strong? Oh, don't be so silly, he'll say, so I can go to work, of course. Oh, I see. So that you can get the food to eat, so that you can be strong, so you can go to work to get the food to eat, so that you can be strong and go to work to get the food. Wait a minute. We're going round in circles, aren't we? Ah. So then Mr. Jones revises his idea, you see. Ah, he says, but I have other things. I go to work, you see. I go to work to get money because I've got half a dozen children, and I want to give them a good education, you see. That's why I go to work. You do really? And you go to work to get the money, yes? To to so your children can get a good education. Yes? And why do your children need to get a good education? Don't be silly, so they can get a good job. Oh, I see. So why would they want a good job? Well, that's so they can earn a lot of money. I see, what for? Well, so in good time they can send their children to get a good education. Oh, I see. What for? So they can earn money to to... Wait a minute, we're going around in circles once more, aren't we? And things that seem to be a goal turn out to be merely an end to some other project, and that project again turns out to be merely a means to some other project. And the Greeks early saw it, and they said, but that can't be life's chief aim, just to go round in circles. What is the goal in life that is the objective, that is not simply a means to something else? So the Greeks asked the question, and they came up with all kinds of answers. And you may pity them, of course, because you know what the answer is, don't you? But I can't find it in my heart to despise them for asking the questions, can you? I was teaching these things, as it was my duty at one stage, to a class of university students. And among the students present were some believers, some young believers. And I thought here I'll give them a chance to witness for the Lord. So when I, I explain what a summum bonum is, the objective in life that is the chief end in life and is not a means to something else, I said to the students, now, sirs, ladies and gentlemen, anybody here got a summum bonum? Anybody like to tell me what their chief goal in life is? And I was hoping for some of the Christian students present to say, yes, of course. The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. That's why we are coming to a university, not simply to get a good job and get money and get a good house. We're coming here as a sacred duty to our Creator so that we may improve ourselves, so that we may strive to the great objective of serving God, seeking his glory, and enjoying him forever. And I suppose nobody had talked to these young believers like that before, and they kept their place, and they kept their silence, and the opportunity went by. We must be careful, mustn't we, not to criticize the ancient philosophers, when sometimes we as Christians haven't got our objective clearly in our mind either. And we can get carried away to make the great objective of life simply the making of a career and money and cars and houses, and lose the great objective that whatever we do is to be done to please the Lord. And the Greek philosophers, they were not only concerned with what is life's goal, they were very much concerned with how to behave uprightly and ethically. Or listen to the Latin philosophers, for instance, posing practical questions. If you were trying to sell your house and people came to view it, ought you as a moral duty to point out to the people the things about your house that are not as they should be, that a foundation here is sinking a bit, or there's damp rising up in that wall, or that sometimes when the wind is wrong, we get polluted by the smoke of some factory. Or should you keep quiet about those things, hope that the buyer doesn't notice and pays you a good price, only to find when he's bought it from you that he's bought a dud? Now, what should a Christian do? The ancient Greeks and Romans would have said that to be an honest and honorable man, the seller of the house ought to point out the defects in the house and be absolutely honest with the buyer. I have to tell you, my brothers and sisters, I've known many Christians who are not honest in business. Oh, we need to be careful, don't we? Before we decry education, philosophy, and thinking. Philosophy, in the sense of the pursuit of thinking and how to think logically, is a very useful tool. It doesn't have the answers, but it can point us sometimes to asking the right questions. The answer is in Christ, of course, and it is through Christ that we must look for those answers. In fact, the philosophy that Paul is here talking about isn't the ordinary and original straight Greek philosophy. It was a later development that was full of stupid speculation. There were people who said, as they looked at this imperfect world, this world cannot be the creation of a perfect God. And therefore they speculated that it wasn't God who made the world. There must be lesser gods, they said. And down the chain of lesser gods, there was one or more who created this imperfect world because they themselves, though excellent in power, were lesser deities, and some of them fallen deities. And so they constructed a whole scheme of philosophy and would have said that they could have told you, told you all about these hierarchies of principalities and powers and mights and dominions who were responsible for the world, and they would tell you how you have to court their favor and seek them and be careful lest you offend all these principalities and powers, else they could do you harm. A kind of thing that you would expect to find in certain forms of Hinduism and the New Age movement. It was that bogus philosophy that Paul was talking about here, as you can hear him say, principalities and powers help you to a mature life. What absolute nonsense. The resource open to you is the blessed Lord Jesus Christ. He is the head of all principality and power. You need none other source but him. Oh, come to the higher source, says Paul. Not go off into some esoteric philosophy, yoga, new age, and all that kind of thing, and get excessively interested in demonic powers and cultivating the spirit power within you and all that kind of false, bogus philosophy. But cultivate Christ. You could almost put it this way, following Paul's remark. As you receive Christ, the Lord to start with, walk in him. You don't need to go outside him. The way forward is the way back to Christ. Christ is enough. And consider the actual situation, do, ladies and gentlemen, and how it is that Christ is the only one that can lead you to spiritual maturity. Paul describes our spiritual condition as he comes to the end of that paragraph in two ways. First, there was the fact that we were uncircumcised, the body, as he calls it, of the flesh, our fallen human nature. We shall have to find answer to this, shan't we, if we are to become spiritually mature. What is the secret of the putting off of the body of the flesh? The secret of overcoming. The answer is this. God could, of course, have said, well, you're a pretty poor lot, you are fallen creatures, you are corrupt. The best thing to do i- to get rid of the body of the flesh is to destroy it. But that would have been a puzzle for us, wouldn't it? Because if God destroyed our fallen, uh, human nature, he would have destroyed us, wouldn't he? And that would have been the end of us. The problem that confronted God was how to get rid of that fallen thing, the body of the flesh, as he calls it, and yet save us as human personalities. And the wonder of it was this. He provided the man Jesus Christ, our Lord, Son of God and Son of man. And the wonder of the Lord Jesus is this. He is such a person as we can be put into him. There's nothing less than that. That is the secret of our overcoming. What happened in conversion was a marvelous thing. God calls it the circumcision of Christ. Let me try to explain it, difficult though it me to conceive of it. Tell me, my brother, tell me, my sister. Suppose one of these days, in one uh hundred and five years, you pass away, and they put you in your coffin, and they put you in the ground. And when the Lord comes and you rise to meet him, will you have with you that old fallen nature that is so beset and dogged you all your li- years? You say, no, of course not. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. When the Lord comes, I, I, I, I shall rise to meet him. I shan't have it. Oh, thank God, I shan't have it anymore. Not that old, old, old, old stuff that was my terror all my days. No, I shall be free from it at last. Oh, wonderful. And how will you have got rid of it? Will it have been the worms, uh, in the grave that ate it all up or something? Well, if it is, God be thanked for the worms. Why not try a few now, my dear brother? Set them at you. That isn't the worms, is it? Because when the unregenerate rise and stand before the great white throne, they shall still be their ugly, unregenerate selves as always they were, and hell will be that, in part. They'll still be the proud, lustful, lying, self-centered egoists that they always were. That is the horror of sin. It's not the worms in the grave that will take it away, my brother, my sister. What sets you free from it? What set you free was when you came to agree with God, seriously, responsibly, that you were so corrupt that nothing could be done to improve you. The only thing that God could do satisfactorily with you was to pronounce sentence of death and carry it out and have you executed, and that the end of you. And you said, for that is what repentance is, yes, Lord, that is so. If I lived till I was ninety nine and a half, Lord, I should still be a sinner. I might as well face it now. There's no hope. I deserve simply to be executed, dead, buried. And when you agreed to that, God offered you his son, didn't he? And said, will you put your hope solely in my son and rely for your spiritual life hereafter solely on my son? Do you agree to that? And you said yes, didn't you? And in those moments, the roots of your personality were cut and transferred to Christ. Listen to the Holy Apostle explain it elsewhere, says he in Romans eight chapter nine, you are not in the flesh, you are in the spirit, if the Spirit of Christ be in you. There was the great transfer made. Oh, I bid you to rejoice in the wonder of it. And if it has not dawned on us as it should, and it hasn't on any of us, oh God, help us to see it tonight. If you are a true believer, you were buried with Christ when God's sentence upon us was carried out and Christ was executed. Died with him. You were buried with him. And now, thank God, already, not waiting for any worms, already you are raised with Christ, and you're in Christ. In the blessed Son of God himself, the roots of your personality are in Christ. The tree of your personality might not have grown as it should have grown. Its leaves as scanty may be, its fruit, you lament, is not what its fruit should be. But all thank God, if you are a true believer, the great transference has taken place, and you are not in the flesh, says Paul. You are in the spirit. You are in Christ. That is not vain imagination. That is as literal as your very heartbeat is literal. In Christ. Oh, what a lovely phrase it is all through the pages of the New Testament. In Christ. And all the limitless resource of his life is for you, like a branch taken and grafted into a completely different root, and now bears its fruit. So you are in Christ. That is why no principality, power, might, or dominion could possibly have helped you. You can't be joined like that to an angel. No angel can share his life with you. You can't be in Michael or in Gabriel. Uh, wisdom of God's scheme is that his son has become human, and you can be in Christ. If it be true that all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are in Christ, then how blessed you are. This is your hope of glory. Ah, but more, from another point of view, you were not only uncircumcised, troubled with the body of the flesh, as Paul calls it. You were dead. Dead. Not literally dead, but as good as. Because arrayed against you were the commandments of God's holy law, the bond written in ordinances, there they stood. It was public knowledge in heaven, earth, and hell that you had broken those laws. And the laws said that you must die. You were as good as dead. Almost as good as if you'd been consigned to the eternal burnings. What could any angel do there? Indeed, Paul boldly tells us that principalities and powers gathered round his cross, waiting for what he would do. Said to themselves, I fancy, now watch it. If God is going to forgive those sinners and say their sin doesn't matter and will agree to forget it and brush it under the God Almighty's throne and said, there's God for you. He said it doesn't matter and he's going to take them to heaven. And unless forgiven. All my sent holiness won't do, will it? Does our coming short matter as believers? God, before he takes us home to him. Story is of hell gathered round God on moral grounds for forg- took those against us, and and on God rushed the whole act, held it to his savior. In the school to which I went, some of us were subjected to the rigors of chemistry. I escaped them after a year, very wisely, I think, in the view of the headmaster. But before we boys were allowed into the chemistry laboratory, parents had to put down a deposit of money in case, in our ardour to learn chemistry, we blew the whole labor- laboratory up, you see. Our parents had to be prepared to pay expenses in advance, do they, for our education. Oh, my brother, my sister. God has paid in advance the expenses of your spiritual education. It doesn't mean that you're free to go out and sin, of course not. The mistakes, the wanderings, the coming short that you lament in your heart and would depress you and stop you in your cynicism from coming back to the Lord and beginning again. I want to tell you tonight that God has paid in advance if you are a true believer, and you can repent and come back to the Lord. You needn't sit there cynically and say it's no use and it doesn't work. You can come back to the Lord, and all can be forgiven, and you may start again. This is the glory of the gospel, and only that will do. Philosophy then? No, that's a tradition of men. What we want is all the fullness of the Godhead, bodily in human form, so that we can be united with him. The others we may deal with far more quickly. Time says we must. Not religious observances. Let no man therefore judge you in meat or in drink or in respect of a feast day or a new moon or a Sabbath day. And once more, we have to be careful, for there are dear believers, aren't there, that do have a genuine conscience about the Sabbath. They're quite clear in their minds that we don't earn salvation by keeping the Sabbath, but they do honestly feel that if we are believers, we shall fulfill the law, and they feel that the law tells us that we Christians must keep the Sabbath. We must respect their conscience, mustn't we? We mustn't get it into our heads that we are such liberated people that we can tramp over other people's consciences. There are parts of the great and famous land of Scotland. Don't tell me you've never heard of Scotland, but, uh, the- it is a country in the far north, you'll say, and uh, you'll say there are certain parts of it where Christians are to be found who have this conscience, and unconverted people who have that conscience. And if they saw you driving your car on a Sunday, they would think you were deliberately breaking the law of God. They wouldn't listen to you preach the gospel even if you attempted it. You might as well rob a supermarket on the Saturday and s- try to preach the gospel on a Sunday. I wouldn't listen to you. For their sake, for their conscience sake, you would have to respect it, wouldn't you? But that said, of course, we must make sure that we don't content ourselves with mere religious observances and miss the reality. These are but shadows, says Paul. The reality, the body, is Christ. Oh, how easily we can content ourselves with mere religious observance, instead of going for the reality. As many a man and woman celebrates Christmas, you know, but don't know the great Savior that was born. Many a man and woman will celebrate Easter this year and haven't the reality in their hearts. The very celebration of the, the, the religious day then serves to deaden their sense of need for the reality. And in the third place, says Paul, beware of visions. Beware of these people that promise you that they can give you the technique for developing visions. Well, nowadays visions have become very popular in some circles, haven't they? And people have all sorts of vision. I see a vision, they say. Marvelous. Huh. Beware of it. That is not to say that, uh, God's people never have visions. Paul had visions, didn't he? Though he didn't talk much about them. He did have genuine visions. But the visions he's talking about now are visions that Jews, particularly certain section of Jews, said that they could teach you how to have these visions. They called it the merkabah mysticism. They said that just like Ezekiel saw a vision of the throne of God, you could too, if you learned their techniques, they could show you the techniques of body manipulation, of mind manipulation, of yoga breathing, and all such methods, so that you could have an out of the body experience, and you could rise up through the principalities and powers and come to the very throne of God. Only they said you had to be very careful because the principalities and powers could injure you if you weren't careful, particularly on the way down back into the body. And so you had to go by their techniques. And of course, the Eastern world is full of it still, isn't it? And some of those forms of shamanism are coming now into so-called Christianity, and the cult of seeking visions is a most unhealthy cult indeed. Not visions. What then? Says Paul, the man that is seeking visions by those techniques is, uh, foolishly puffed up in his fleshly mind. There are things going on in his little head, but that's not the criterion as to the value of the thing. The criterion is what's going on in the mind of him who is the head. And this man is going in for visions, but he is not holding the head, which is Jesus Christ. Don't seek visions, my dear brother and sister. Seek the Lord. Don't seek ecstatic vision. Seek his solid word. Let him talk to you. Let him show you the resource that there is in him. And finally, asceticism, says Paul. You'll say it was a thing in the ancient world that a lot of people admired, when people began to te- treat their bodies in a very stern way, and starve them and beat them, and develop all sorts of tech- uh, psychological methods of controlling themselves. And alas, that kind of thing came into Christendom, didn't it? Hence the habit of using whips on the naked back in many a monastery and a convent, and all sorts of penances such as we see people perform in the part of the world where I come from, where they'll climb a three thousand-foot mountain in their bare feet, thinking by the pain of their body somehow to cleanse their souls. It's bogus. That is not to say that we are to be undisciplined. I control my body, says Paul, lest after I have preached to others, I be disapproved of. We have to learn godly self-control of our body. But godly self-control of our body is one thing. Injuring our body, inflicting pain on our body is another, and it's bogus, says Paul. It can be very impressive, can't it, to see a man lying on concrete all night and walking on his bare feet and fasting for fifty days and all that kind of thing, and climbing great mountains in his bare feet. It looks impressive. No use, says Paul. In fact, all it panders to is the man's own fleshly sense of achievement. What is the answer then? Well, not in afflicting the body. Of course it isn't. It is to be in touch with the creator of the body. Suppose, sir, one of these nights your car breaks down on the road, and I come along, we'll see, dressed up in my uniform to help you, and I look at the car and I say, I know what the car like this deserves, you'll see. I'm an expert in these matters. You want to kick the thing hard. And I proceed to kick it, and if it doesn't go, I say, well, I'll tell you, I'd teach your car a lesson. I should put some sand in the cylinder head. That would teach it. And you'll say, there's a lunatic to start with. And the one thing that would be clear was that I wasn't the creator of the car. Isn't that so? And people that tell you that you can, uh, cure your soul by afflicting your body show by that very advice that they're out of touch with the creator of the body. He'll never ruin your body in that sense. Of course not. And it wouldn't do any good anyway. You are dead with Christ, you are risen with Christ, and the secret is constantly to remember the glorious fact that our very bodies are temples of the Holy Ghost. Then here Paul's final advice. If you'll be dead with Christ, if you'll be risen with Christ, seek those things that are above, where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God. For you are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God, and when Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall we appear with him also in glory. We are to set not merely our affections, that can be difficult. We are to set our thoughts. We are to control our thinking, and constantly as our thoughts wander, we are to bring them back and focus our thoughts on the blessed Lord Jesus, for he is our life. Pray remember it, my brother, my sister. You have no life without Christ. It is a false idea to imagine that our God has given us eternal life in the sense that he's put it in a little brown paper parcel and handed it to us, and we may take the parcel, and we've got eternal life, and we don't have to keep in contact with Christ. We can go our way and forget him days without number. That is false, my dear sir. We, none of us have eternal life except in Christ. Therefore, let us heed the exhortation. If you be risen with Christ and joined to Christ, and the secret of coming to great spiritual maturity is constantly to set your thoughts on Christ. Let him manifest himself to us in all his great reality and in his saving power. The Lord bless our study of his word to that end for his name's sake.