We find perfect Christian balance in Jesus Christ himself. We are complete in Him, because in Him all fulness dwells (Col 2:9-10). In Jesus we are holy. In Him we will be holy and live holy. We will be changed and different. We will obey His Word. We won’t be ruled by the flesh any more. But we also are free. We are free from the religion of human achievement. We don’t attain spirituality by keeping lists of rules. With live righteous lives in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.
A group of false teachers in the Colossae region went around making people feel guilty because they didn’t keep a list of rules not found in Scripture. To them, even if you had received Christ, you weren’t saved if you didn’t keep their pet menu of rituals and regulations and routines. External standards are always tempting. Unconverted phonies can conform to them, so they don’t provide a suitable basis to judge someone’s conversion. Salvation is by grace through faith, but spiritual bullies desire to coerce others into their own criteria for spirituality, causing confusion and doubt to a church.
So Paul tells these churches at Colossae and Laodecia not to restrict themselves solely because of these false teachers that want them to cramp their lifestyles to earn their way to righteousness (v. 16). This contradicted the sufficiency they had in Christ (vv. 9, 10). He wasn’t, by the way, saying to them that they could do whatever they wanted. Colossians 2 isn’t the only passage in the Bible on liberty. There are huge chunks of text on this in Romans, 1 Corinthians, and Galatians as well. For instance, he wasn’t requiring them to jump through the salvation hoops of the Essenes, but in other passages he does tell the church to look out for the welfare of the weaker brother. They didn’t have liberty to sin, to be worldly, to be a stumbling block, to be a bad testimony, to let their good be evil spoken of, to disobey church leadership, or to cause disunity in the church. But he didn’t want them to be bullied by the onerous self-serving dicta of genuine legalists.
Pastor Robert Smith is facing a hard decision. Another Bible-believing pastor in his town has asked him to participate in a joint youth outreach emphasis. The difficulty is that Pastor Smith has some significant differences with the other church in terms of ministry philosophy and the practice of youth ministry. Although he does not wish to throw stones, he does not feel comfortable participating in the event. Pastor Smith is sure that some of his church members believe that he should publicly separate from the other church. Other members would see nothing wrong with participating, given that the gospel is more important than a church’s “parochial interests.”