Calvario Albuquerque Podcast En Español

The global fashion market is a $1.55 trillion industry. It’s because everyone wears clothes! From birth to death, people cover themselves with apparel both for warmth and for style. The Christian believer should also have a spiritual closet filled with the right (and righteous) garments. Paul has been speaking about the “old man” versus the “new man,” and he does so using a fashion metaphor. In these three verses, he explains how every Christian can dress for success!

Today’s message title may sound suspiciously similar to last week’s message title. That’s because we are dealing with two different sides of the same coin. Paul began this chapter by focusing our attention on heaven in the first four verses. Now he brings us back down to earth where we are slugging it out in the trenches of sensuality and hatred. While on our way to heaven, we are still doing battle on earth. Paul tells us that heavenly citizens should take three firm steps while living on earth.

“Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal,” said Thomas Moore. But if that is true, why don’t we think more about heaven? Why do we only think and talk about heaven at funerals? How can the reality of our future home motivate our activities right now? If you were to think about your life in terms of chronology, how much time do you have left on earth? Let’s look at three categories of truth that will help us aim at heaven while we are living on earth.

Karl Marx insisted that “religion is the opium of the people,” while Napoleon Bonaparte suggested that “religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.” But within the broad category of religious belief are ideologies and practices that are dangerous and silly because they distract people from the essence of truth. God made it simple by having His Son do for us what we could never do on our own—reach God! Religion takes what is simple and merely complicates it.

Sitting in the choir loft one Sunday morning, Elvina Hall, inspired by a sermon, wrote in the flyleaf of her songbook the words to a now-famous hymn: “Jesus paid it all; all to Him I owe.” Paul expressed much the same thing in this paragraph. After telling his readers they were complete in Christ, he then showed them how that was so. Against the backdrop of false teachers, some of whom insisted on performing rituals, Paul showed exactly what Jesus had done.

Jesus Christ is the most controversial person who has ever lived! There are as many opinions about Him as there are religions, cults, philosophies, and church denominations. Though Paul had never met the young Christians in the church of Colosse, he was deeply concerned for them since attractive, man-made philosophies were making inroads. He wanted them to know the truth, to grow in their faith, and to be careful of any human ideas that diminish the place of Jesus Christ. I have summed up Paul’s concerns with three simple directives: Believe! Behave! Beware!

Serving Christ is the result of being saved by Christ. But the Christian life should carry a warning label: “Warning: Those who enter here won’t find it easy. In fact, at times it will be very difficult, but it will be the greatest adventure ever!” In this paragraph, Paul opened the curtain on his own personal life as a servant of Christ and shared five characteristics of his own ministry. Are they yours?

Today we come to one of the most important truths of the New Testament—that we have been reconciled to God. The gap that separates humans from their Creator has been closed by one person and one action. The results of that act are what brings God and His rebel creatures into a restored relationship. Let’s take a deeper dive into these magnificent realities and what they mean to us.