Useful Bible Studies > Colossians Commentary > chapter 2

Our trust in Christ must be strong, to defend us from wrong ideas

Colossians 2:8

Be careful, Paul says to Colosse’s Christians. There are many people who want to lead you away from the simple truth of the gospel (the good news about Christ). They want to rob you of your trust in Christ, to take away the joy of your relationship with Christ.

Now that you are a Christian, Christ must be your guide (verse 6). You must constantly depend on him for the strength and power to live in the way that pleases God (verse 7). So you need to keep to the gospel message that you have learned. You need to grow and to develop your trust in Christ. You need to learn a grateful attitude, and constantly to give thanks to God.

Otherwise, those people who are bringing wrong ideas into your church will tempt you away from Christ. They speak so well, with their impressive arguments and clever ideas. However, those ideas are really lies, because they come from men and not from God.

That is why so many people approve of false teachers. Unless our faith (trust in Christ) is strong, we all much prefer our human ideas to God’s word. In other words, we want to control our own lives, and not to allow God to direct us.

Human traditions and rules seem to give us control over our own lives: we know what we are doing. However, that feeling is not real. In reality, we are giving other people (and not God) the right to direct our lives. That was why the false teachers taught these rules: they wanted to control people’s lives (2 Corinthians 11:13-20). When Christians accepted their authority, they were not just allowing wrong teachers to direct their lives. The devil was using those wrong teachers to spoil Christians’ relationship with Christ. Christians need to stand against such attacks by the devil, by such means as the Bible, prayer and faith (trust) in Christ (Ephesians 6:10-18).

Next part: Christ: fully God, and fully man (Colossians 2:9)

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© 2019, Keith Simons.