Colossians 2:6-23. Avoid captivity | Darren Coult | 260920 | Growing as Christians

Do you ever feel like a substandard Christian? That maybe feel that your Christian life isn't really a success, but more, if you're honest, a dismal failure? Maybe you've been a Christian for a long time now and you find yourself thinking, is this it? I've just got to do better.

Or maybe you're here this morning and you're a newer Christian.

But after that initial excitement of trusting Jesus, you're finding, well, it's just a whole lot harder than you ever thought it would be.

That is pretty normal Christian experience.

You come to Jesus knowing you've done all sorts of things that are wrong and finding forgiveness in him that is such a relief.

Until you discover, well, you've not changed in the way that you hoped.

Keep finding new depths of selfishness in yourself that you never realized were there.

Keep losing those same battles with yourself.

your temper, or with lust, or with dishonesty.

And you realize that there's a power at work in your life that, what did you notice that's being described there at the end of verse 23, right at the end of what Jane just read for us? It's translated there as sensual indulgence, but that probably just makes you imagine eating too many cream cakes.

Rather

than what the Apostle Paul is really talking about here.

Because Paul calls it the flesh.

It's the same words he uses in verse 11 and again in verse 13.

And what Paul's talking about is not our physical bodies, the flesh, but our fallen sinful nature.

That part of ourselves that we start to realise is just addicted

to sin.

always pulling us away from the God who loves us and towards things that we know are wrong, that will only do us harm.

Do you recognise that in yourself? Paul knew that when we become a Christian, that battle with our sinful nature, it isn't over.

No, it's really only just beginning.

And he knows that that is hard.

And discouraging, finding ourselves in a fight with the flesh and we're often losing.

And so as Paul wrote this letter to this young church in Colossae, he knew that they were very likely to face an ongoing sense of spiritual failure that was very normal.

But also very dangerous.

Because it leaves us vulnerable, verse 8, to being taken captive.