Established and Firm
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Established and Firm

 (ID: 1031)

To become a Christian is nothing less than to have your life transformed. Before Christ’s intervention, the state of any human soul is alienation. In fact, we weren’t just separated from God; we were His enemies! But now, since Jesus has taken our sins to the cross, we can be reconciled to God, freed from the deadly effects of sin and made holy. As Alistair Begg reminds us, however, what happens after reconciliation is critical: we must persevere in faith, which gives evidence of God’s good work in our lives.

Series Containing This Sermon

A Study in Colossians, Volume 1

Christ the Foundation Colossians 1:1–2:15 Series ID: 15101


Sermon Transcript: Print

Father, we’re so glad this morning that as we come now to study, the congregation don’t wait to see what pearls of wisdom I’ve been able to dream up—’cause that would be pretty futile. Nor, Lord, have I been agonizing over ideas. But together, as pastor and people, we come before you, the living God, who speaks through your living Word, the Bible. And we want to sit, as it were, underneath it today. We want for the Holy Spirit to take it, to make it plain to us so that even the smallest boy and girl may understand, and then to write it in our hearts so that we may be radically different as a result of what we discover together now. And so we pray for the enabling of the Holy Spirit as we offer our prayer to you in Jesus’ name. Amen.

In our last two studies, we were looking at verses 15–20 of this first chapter of Colossians, and we said that these verses comprised one of the key passages in the whole of the New Testament on the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. We began to study them by asking the question, “Who is Jesus Christ?” And, endeavoring to summarize a great wealth of theological truth, we noted that he is Lord of creation; he is head of the church; he is the reconciler of all things.

Now, having laid down these weighty theological statements, Paul moves now, in the three verses that are before us this morning, to remind his readers and therefore to remind all who in turn read this letter that the real relevance of these truths is to be found in their personal application. He wants the Colossian Christians not to think of reconciliation as some weighty subject to be dealt with by the theologians, but rather, he encourages them to see the wonder of reconciliation by reflecting upon what they used to be and by considering what they have now become. He reminds them that they have experienced a radical change in their lives, and the input of truth in the Lord Jesus Christ has been seen not in the fact that they have become more educated but has been seen ultimately in the fact that their lives have been transformed.

One commentator put it in this way: “Of what value are high-flown, exuberant affirmations of faith concerning Christ and God, Christ and creation, Christ and the future, if in our own individual lives Christ has done nothing very much?”[1] And that is the rub of it all. What value is it if for two weeks and quite a long number of minutes we have been dealing with these deep theological verities if at the heart of the matter, the Lord Jesus means very little if anything to us at all this morning? And it was that concern which gripped Paul’s heart and made him something of not only the masterful teacher that he was but the concerned pastor—albeit although he was never in a church for any time longer than perhaps three years in Ephesus.

So what I want to suggest to you this morning: that although our title is lifted from verse 23 and comprises just three words, “Established and Firm,” I want to suggest that an appropriate subtitle would be “How to Tell If You’re a Christian.” “How to Tell If You’re a Christian.” Because what we have before us here are three aspects of the Christian life which were not unique to the believers at Colossae, but rather, these factors will be in existence in the lives of everyone who truly trusts in Christ in every generation. So verses 15–20 answered for us, at least in part, the question “Who is Jesus Christ?” Verses 21–23 answer for us the question “What is a Christian?” “What is a Christian?”

Some people think that a Christian is somebody who was born in America, or a Christian is someone who was born in Great Britain, or a Christian is someone who is not a Muslim, or a Christian is someone who is not a Jew, a Christian is someone who has a heritage of churchgoing, a Christian is someone who inherited it from his parents, a Christian is someone who tries to live by the Sermon on the Mount, a Christian is someone who goes to church. What is a “Christian”—one of the most abused terms in our generation? Well, don’t let’s look to men to answer the question. Let’s look to God as he reveals it in his Bible.

What You Once Were

We’re going to notice, first of all, that in verse 21, Paul describes for the believers what they once were.

Incidentally, I’ve taken these three points on the outline this morning, lifted them quite unashamedly from one of my friends, the Reverend Richard Lucas, who is the pastor of St. Helen’s Bishopsgate in the center of London.[2] And it’s one of these situations where what else can you say but—verse 21 says—“What You Once Were.” I mean, “You Were Once What?” You see, you can fiddle the words around, but he said it as good as I could possibly say it, so I figured he wouldn’t mind if I just used it. I want to give credit where credit’s due. The more difficult-to-follow outlines are probably original to me, but this morning, it’s very straightforward. “What You Once Were.” “What You Once Were.”

Now, verse 21 breaks down very easily into three phrases which reminded the Christians in Colossae of what they were like before they responded to the good news. You remember in verse 6, Paul had reminded them that the gospel, the truth of the gospel, had come to them—a gospel which “all over the world” was “producing fruit and growing.” And they had heard this—verse 7—they had “learned it from Epaphras, our dear fellow servant, … a faithful minister of Christ on our behalf, and who also told us of your love in the Spirit.”[3]

So, here were these people living in Colossae, just as we’re living in Cleveland this morning. And God brought his servant Epaphras to them. And Epaphras began to tell them good news in a bad-news world. And as a result of the good news, their lives were transformed, and so Paul is now able to write to them and say, “Do you remember what you were like before Epaphras came and shared with you the good news of the Lord Jesus Christ?” So for a Christian, there is always a before. There is always that to which we may now look back in hindsight, having been made new. One of the real tests as to whether I’m a Christian this morning is to where I’m able to look back and identify a period when I was different from what I am now—a “once was” situation: “This is what I was once like.” “This is what the Colossian Christians were once like.”

Now, in this, and in these three phrases, we have an apt description of what man is like by nature—in other words, man as man. What is a man? What is he like? What are the innate characteristics of him? Well, here we have three. And this is what an unbeliever is like—a person before they came to faith in Jesus Christ.

First of all: “alienated from God.” “Alienated from God.” The Bible makes that very clear in numerous places. In the Old Testament, Isaiah the prophet, in 59:2, confronts the people of his day with this statement:

Your iniquities have separated
 you from your God;
your sins have hidden his face from you.

Sin, says Isaiah, is that which has alienated a holy God from sinful man. Men and women do not accept that today. Without knowing it, many times people in the twentieth century are pantheists: God is everywhere, God is in everything, God is in you, God is all, and all you have to do is kind of plug in at some point along the way. Bible doesn’t say that. It says that man qua man is alienated from God—that sin has made a separation between man and God. And as hard as it may be for us to understand, the child that is born from the mother’s womb, the psalmist says, is born “in sin” and “shapen in iniquity”[4]—is born with all the requirements, is born with a sin nature as a result of what happened in the fall in Genesis chapter 3, so that that wee rascal who runs around your house did not become the kind of little rascal that he is purely because of the bad example you set him. He is that little rascal because he is that little rascal. And he, she, that wee one, is alienated from God.

Writing to the Ephesians, Paul makes the same statement in Ephesians 2:12. He says, “Remember”—he’s reflecting again—“remember that at that time”—that is, before they came to Christ—“you were”—notice the phrase—“separate from Christ, … without hope and without God in the world.” That is man as man: “alienated from God,” “without hope and without God in the world.”

Now, when you think about this, it makes a great deal of sense in our day, doesn’t it? Why is it that people are, today, into such a great quest to find themselves? And people say all the time, they say, “I had to go out to such and such a place to find myself. I went over into the desert to find myself.” You know what they mean, though, don’t you? It’s not that they’re lost. I mean, if they get up in the morning and look in the mirror, there they are! What they’re saying is this: that in their heart, in their existence, there is such a sense of alienation—alienated from other people, alienated even from their very selves. And what they do not know, because no one has ever told them what the Bible says, is that alienation stems from the fact that man is alienated from God, that the source of all our alienation—the alienation of moms to dads, and dads to moms, and parents to children, and children to their uncles and their grandparents, and teachers to their students, and students to their teachers, and policemen to the folks in the street—the source of all of that, says the Bible, is because man by his very nature is alienated from God.

One of the earlier saints, if we may use the word guardedly, pointed out that man, in their hearts, are restless “until they find their rest in thee, O God.”[5] That’s why you’ll find on the backs of leather jackets, as they walk around you on the streets, two words occurring again and again: “No Future.” As young people look out on life, they have assumed that there is nothing to live for. And so on the back of their jackets, they embrace the philosophy of nihilism, without even having gone to school to learn what it is. They know what it is! They’re alienated from God, they’re alienated from their parents, they’re alienated from their friends, they’re alienated from themselves, and they’re “without hope and without God in the world.” That, says the Bible, is the innate characteristic of man before he meets Christ.

Man wants to blame God for his condition. Man won’t believe he’s sinful, won’t believe he deserves punishment.

The Beatles, who’ve been abused and said all things about, at least wrote one or two decent songs and proved that they were thinking in a generation that was by and large searching. And so they wrote,

He’s a real nowhere man,
[Living] in his nowhere land,
Making all his nowhere plans for nobody.

[He] doesn’t have a point of view,
[He] knows not where he’s going to;
Isn’t he a bit like [me and you]?

Nowhere man, please listen.[6]

Alienated from God.

Many of the generation that you and I don’t understand—the people who will crowd the Coliseum to listen to Culture Club in a week or two from now, the people who will pack out these stadiums—are longing, searching for answers to the deepest questions in their lives. And God forbid that we turn up our coat collars at them and call them punk rockers and let them walk off into their own eternity.

Secondly: “alienated from God” and “enemies in your minds.” Man is naturally not apathetic to God; man is naturally antagonistic to God. You tell somebody that the Bible says that about them, and you’ll see just how antagonistic they are to God. You tell an unbelieving friend that the Bible says that man is alienated and is an enemy of God in his mind, and he will tell you, “Don’t be ridiculous. That’s a strange notion.” And the very antagonism of his heart will be revealed right over again. Man wants to blame God for his condition. Man won’t believe he’s sinful, won’t believe he deserves punishment, claims the problem lies in the harshness of the justice of God’s law; the problem lies in the injustices of life; the problem lies in the hopelessness of the human predicament. How many times have you heard in conversation somebody say, “You’re surely not going to tell me that you believe all that nonsense about God and sin, about heaven and hell? Don’t tell me you believe that junk.” Why does man say that? Because he is an enemy of God in his mind, in his thinking.

When Paul wrote to the church at Rome, he made this very clear in one of the most straightforward passages in the whole of the New Testament concerning the state of man—one that has caused havoc when confronting many a university student. And this is what he says in Romans chapter 1 and verse 18, and then verse 21: he says, “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men”—and notice this phrase—“who suppress the truth by their wickedness.” They “suppress the truth.” They squash down that which has been written in them by Creator God, and they think up elaborate ways of denying it. Verse 21: “For although they knew God”—that is, man—“they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him.” Now, notice what happened to them. It was in the realm of their minds: “But their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. [And claiming] to be wise, they became fools.”

And despite the weight of evidence to the contrary, men and women still claim today that man is good at heart; if you can only fix up his external conditions, you’ll have him all set. And I ask you: Has it worked? I know not a great deal about America, but I can trace a little of the history of my own country. And coming out of the eighteenth century into the nineteenth century, the cry was “If we can only create better social conditions—if we can only educate them, house them, provide medicine for them—then we will remove all the social ills of our day.” And so we developed one of the best systems anywhere in the world. And then, from the nineteenth century moving into the twentieth century: “We just need to tighten it up a bit. I’m sure it’s coming. It will be coming.” And into the twentieth century, and then hit by the First World War—the war that was to end all wars—and a period of fear that exists between the wars, and then a Second World War breaks on them. And man is left, about 1945, asking the question, “What is this all about?” And a generation rejected God because of what they’d seen on the fields of Flanders. And they bred a generation that grew up caring little about God, and they in turn bred a generation that learned to live without him and ignore him. And today, a new generation has arisen that has said, “Something went wrong here back about 1945.” And one of the greatest areas of growth is amongst young couples with a house and a car and two and a half children and a longing in their hearts for reality. It’s a great turnaround. Enemies in their minds. They need their thinking sorted out.

We don’t have time now to turn to it, but a cross-reference for you is in Mark 7:20–23, where Jesus says to the people around him in his day, he says, “You’ve got it all upside-down. You think that it’s what is outside of a man that goes inside of a man and makes him unclean.” He says, “Don’t be ridiculous! What goes inside of a man goes into his tummy and then goes on the proper channel from there.” He says, “That doesn’t make a man unclean.” He’s very straightforward, you know, the Lord, as he spoke. “No, no,” he says, “it is what comes out of the heart of a man that makes a man unclean: evil thoughts, adultery, murder,” and so on through.[7]

And I don’t like to quote Christ and then immediately quote such a pagan as John Lennon, but on his Imagine LP, he wrote a song that had the recurring lyric “[But] one thing you can’t hide is when you’re crippled inside.”[8] And thinking man has thought it through to that, even though he may reject the biblical assessment of his condition.

“Think back,” says Paul, “to what you once were. You were alienated from God. You were enemies in your mind.” The heart of the human problem is the problem of the human heart. “See to it,” says the writer to the Hebrews, “that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God.”[9]

And thirdly, these facts were on account of “your evil behavior.” What he’s pointing out is that man’s condition is revealed in his conduct. Evil deeds are the inevitable result of an evil heart. No matter the culture, no matter the generation: an evil heart, evil deeds. A wee boy with a bad temper beats his sister over the head. It’s an inevitable result. An evil heart, evil deeds.

And the condition is laid very clear before us. We’ll come in Colossians 3:5–9 to some of the evil deeds that Paul is thinking of peculiarly. You may turn forward a page and just look at it there. What are these evil deeds? You think about this. Does this relate to twentieth-century America? “Sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry.” My dear friends, the Bible really makes an incredible amount of sense, despite what your professors may wish to tell you as you sit in their classes. Because remember that no matter how bright they might be, outside of Christ, they are alienated from God. They’re enemies in their minds, no matter how bright, and they have evil behavior which they themselves can’t control.

Where You Now Stand

That’s “What You Once Were.” Moving quickly now: secondly, in verse 22, he points out where they now stand. “Oh,” he says, “that was before. But there’s been a radical transformation in your life. Alienation has been replaced with reconciliation. Now,” says Paul, “think about this. This isn’t just a theological principle,” he says. “This is a transforming power.”

Drastic action such as the death of the Lord Jesus was required because of the dire predicament of man’s sin.

And he points out the sphere of reconciliation: this has taken place through “Christ’s physical body,” dealing again with those… You remember this problem that was inherent in the Colossian church, which came out later as docetism, whereby people believed that Jesus did not actually have a physical body; he only had a spiritual body, so that when he died on the cross, he didn’t really die on the cross at all. Everybody thought he did. He thought he did. And oh, such a load of nonsense!—revealing that men are enemies in their minds. Paul, counteracting that—or the Holy Spirit, realizing what is going to come in the following centuries—says a very interesting thing: he says, “He has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body.” Isn’t that an interesting thing? Counteracting the notion that Jesus never had a physical body.

The sphere of reconciliation is his body, and the instrument of reconciliation is the shedding of his blood by his death. Turn back to Ephesians 2:13. We had previously looked at verse 12, which concludes, “without hope and without God in the world.” That was the before; verse 13 is the after. And look what he says: “But now…” He says, “Remember what you used to be? But now…” And I ask you again this morning: Do you have a “But now” in your experience? Is there a “But now”? I don’t mean “But now I went to church,” “But now I got baptized,” “But now I started to button things up.” “But now I’ve been redeemed.” “You were… But now…” What’s happened? “In Christ Jesus you who [were once] far away have been brought near through the blood of [Jesus].” I was alienated, but now I’ve been reconciled. I was an enemy, but now I’m a friend. I was under the wrath of God; now, because I am in Christ, I need no longer fear it. I once was… I now am…

We need to be very clear that the Bible makes it very straightforward that drastic action such as the death of the Lord Jesus was required because of the dire predicament of man’s sin. It’s something that we need to sound out in our day: that it is not man’s misunderstanding that needs to be dealt with. Man is not just misunderstood or misunderstanding things. The Bible says man is a sinner and that Jesus died for our sin and to deal with the guilt that riddles so many of our lives. Isaiah 59:2: “Your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your [sin has hidden] his face from you.”[10] Isaiah 53:6 provides the correction to it: “All we like sheep have gone astray; we[’ve] turned every one to his own way.” But “the Lord has laid on him”—Jesus—the what? “The iniquity of us all.”[11]

Do you see it? And Christian, have you got it really buttoned down in your brain so that you may go to a hopeless world and tell them good news? What’s the problem? The problem is that iniquity—iniquity… That’s God’s way; iniquity means that man goes this way and this way and every way but this way. Iniquity has separated us from God. So how in the world may I know God? I’m like a sheep that’s gone astray. “The Lord has laid on [Jesus] the iniquity of us all.” And in his death, he has reconciled us to God himself.

We used to sing a little chorus in Scotland that went like this:

There’s a way back to God from the dark paths of sin;
There’s a door that is open [that] you may go in;
At Calvary’s cross [that’s] where you begin
When you come as a sinner to Jesus.[12]

Now, the restoration which Christ works in our lives is made clear, and we’ll just pinpoint it. You’ll notice that reconciliation is not without purpose, but rather, it is that he has worked this way in the lives of those who are his children, first, “to present” us “holy in his sight”—to separate us from sin and to separate us to God.

How is it possible to be presented holy in his sight as we know our lives this morning? Many people regard such a statement with total disbelief, because they think—of becoming holy, of staying holy, of righteousness—that it comes about by keeping the law or by self-effort; so, “I’m going to try and make myself really holy, and then I’ll be holy in his sight.”

Galatians 2:21: “If righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!” In other words, if we can make ourselves holy, Jesus need not have died. Romans 3:20–21: “Therefore no one will be declared righteous,” or holy, “in his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we [became] conscious of sin.” When I saw what God desires for me, demands of me, I realized how far short I fall from that, and I realized myself to be a sinner. That was what the law did. Now we have these two glorious words—you’ll find them all through the New Testament—two words: “But now…” “But now…” “But now a righteousness from God, apart from [the] law, has been made known.” What is the characteristic of this righteousness? The “righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.”

So how may I stand clean? “Before my Lord I stand, and in me not one blemish does he see.”[13] ’Cause I am a special person? Because he saw something in me that was loveable, and he came down and loved me? No. He saw nothing in me to commend me to God, but in the Lord Jesus Christ, he sought me, and he bought me, and he redeemed me so that I need not strive to be saved but, having been saved, that I may be energetically moving forward to become all that God has intended me to be. The prophet, looking forward to Christ, in Isaiah 61:10 says, “He has clothed me with garments of salvation and arrayed me [with] a robe of righteousness.”

I want to get to my final point this morning. Will you just notice the remaining phrases? “To present you holy in his sight…” And then, in a sense, the following two phrases are a commentary on the first: “without blemish and free from accusation.” That is just a lovely statement: “free from accusation.” Is there somebody here in church this morning, and you are pinned in by accusation? You accuse yourself. You know yourself to be wrong. You have sinned. You’ve blown it. You’ve messed things up. You’ve been coming to church. You thought that just by coming, you could put it right, but somehow, you cannot be free from the accusation. Well, in the Lord Jesus Christ, you may be, in turning to him in repentance and in faith.

How You Must Go On

“You were once alienated, but now you’ve been reconciled.” And thirdly, will you notice how we must go on?

I met somebody this morning just walking into the sanctuary. I said to them, “How are you?” They said, “Hanging in there.” I said, “That’s fine. That’s the third point this morning.” And so it is. Notice what he says: these things are true of you “if you continue in your faith, established and firm.” The confidence which verse 22 brings must not lull them into a sense of complacency or of slackness.

What is Paul saying? He’s saying this: perseverance proves faith’s genuine character and therefore is indispensable to salvation. Let me say it again: perseverance proves faith’s genuine character and therefore is indispensable to salvation. You go through your Bible and look for this. You’ll find Paul and Barnabas in Antioch. They addressed the Christians there, and at the end of it all, they urge the believers to do what? “To continue in the grace of God.”[14] John, recording the words of Jesus in 8:31, records Jesus saying this: “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples.” What is the corollary of that? If you do not, then you’re not. The writer to the Hebrews, 3:14: “We have come to share in Christ if we hold firmly [to] the end the confidence we had at the first.”

Does this then imply that a true Christian can lose their salvation? Not at all! In fact, the absolute contrary. What it is saying is this: that the ground of our salvation is the shed blood of the Lord Jesus Christ—verse 22—and part of the evidence of our salvation is our continuance. So, being assured of what we have been made in Christ, we reveal that measure of assurance not by sitting back, not by doing what we like, not by continuing in sin so that grace may abound,[15] but by continuing, by pressing on, by being strenuous, by hanging in there.

Perseverance, you see, does not take place in anybody’s life apart from the power of God. Jesus said—John 15:5—“Apart from me you can do nothing.” You can neither begin your Christian life, go on with your Christian life, or finish your Christian life. Apart from Christ, you may do nothing. The enabling grace of God is required in the beginning and in the middle and in the end. That’s why Paul, when he wrote to the church at Philippi—Philippians 1:6—said, “I am [confident] that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.”[16] And then he urged them on to walk in the faith.

Perseverance proves faith’s genuine character and therefore is indispensable to salvation.

It’s an interesting thing to me that the New Testament emphasis is not to keep inquiring re: the commencement of new life but is to stress the necessity of continuance in that new life, once begun. That’s why in 3 John 4, the apostle says, “I have no greater joy than to [see] my children … walking in the truth.”

The birthday is a great day, let there be no mistake. There can be no life without birth. But today, it would be hard-pressed for me, as I think right now, to give to you the three birthdays of my children. But I can tell you that as I left them this morning, they’re all alive; they’re all walking and doing manifold things. And I delight to see my children walking. I don’t want them to stay there on baby day. And again, in evangelical Christianity, what have we done so much? We’ve pressed people all the time: “When did it begin? When did it begin? Tell me the time. Tell me the time.” The question is: How is it continuing? That’s the question! For many people have had a beginning that has been aborted. Many people have got cards locked away in their wardrobes, have memories of walking all round, and they’ve never continued. So what do we make of them? Well, let’s allow the Word of God to make it clear. Here he says, “This is it for you: you once were, but now you are—if you continue in your faith.”

And your continuance is the evidence of your discipleship, established on the Rock, the Lord Jesus;[17] firm in the face of the windy blasts of temptation and adversity and those who would undermine the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ; holding out for the hope of the gospel so that when men disown it and deny it, we say, “We stand on it. We teach it. We will not move from it. It is all we have.”

And what does your mind go to? Which parable does it go to as you think of this verse, “established and firm”? I know it goes to Matthew 7, the end of it. “There was a man,” said Jesus, “heard my words. There was a man built a house—built it on the sand. Along came the winds. Wallop: no house. He,” said Jesus, “is the man who hears my words but does not put them into practice. Then,” he says, “There was another man built a house—built it on the rock. Winds came, all over the place! Firm, established, continuing. He is the man,” says Jesus, “who hears my words and puts them into practice.”[18]

You see why the Word of God has this for us? It is a disturbing thing, because it shakes us out of our complacency, and it asks us, “Are you going on to know the Lord?” Do you know him better this week than you knew him last week? How’s your Bible reading? How’s your walk with Christ? Are you continuing? Do you know him better? Can you sing, “To Jesus every day … my heart is closer drawn”?[19] You continuing in his Word? That means obedience. Have you been baptized? You declared your faith in the waters of baptism?

“Will your anchor hold,” this morning,

         in the storms of life,
When the clouds unfold their [winds] of strife?
When the strong tides lift, and the [breakers] strain,
Will your anchor drift, or [will it] firm remain?

We have an anchor that keeps the soul
Steadfast and sure while the billows roll,
Fastened to the Rock which cannot move,
Grounded firm and deep in the Savior’s love![20]

Where do you fit in the passage? Are you continuing? Have you begun? Has there been for you a “But now”? May we have the privilege today of introducing you to the Lord Jesus? Would you give us the opportunity of sending to you a piece of literature that would follow this through? Can we help you in any way? Please take time to let us know so that we may respond as God would urge us.

And now may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God our Father and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all evermore. Amen.


[1] R. E. O. White, In Him the Fullness: Homiletic Studies in Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians (Old Tappan, NJ: Revel, 1973), 53.

[2] R. C. Lucas, The Message of Colossians and Philemon: Fullness and Freedom, ed. John R. W. Stott, The Bible Speaks Today (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 1980), 60–62.

[3] Colossians 1:6–7 (NIV 1978). Scripture quotations in this transcript are from the 1978 edition of the NIV unless otherwise indicated.

[4] Psalm 51:5 (KJV).

[5] Augustine, Confessions 1.1.1. Paraphrased.

[6] John Lennon and Paul McCartney, “Nowhere Man” (1965).

[7] Mark 7:18–23 (paraphrased).

[8] John Lennon, “Crippled Inside” (1971).

[9] Hebrews 3:12 (NIV 1978).

[10] Isaiah 59:2 (RSV).

[11] Isaiah 53:6 (RSV).

[12] Eric Hubert Swinstead, “There’s a Way Back to God.”

[13] Nancy Henigbaum, “Clean before My Lord” (1973).

[14] Acts 13:43 (NIV 1978).

[15] See Romans 6:1.

[16] Philippians 1:6 (RSV).

[17] See Matthew 7:24.

[18] Matthew 7:24–27 (paraphrased).

[19] William Clark Martin, “Still Sweeter Every Day” (1899).

[20] Priscilla Jane Owens, “We Have an Anchor” (1882).

Copyright © 2025, Alistair Begg. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations for sermons preached on or after November 6, 2011 are taken from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

For sermons preached before November 6, 2011, unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version® (NIV®), copyright © 1973 1978 1984 by Biblica, Inc.TM Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Alistair Begg
Alistair Begg is Senior Pastor at Parkside Church in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Bible teacher on Truth For Life, which is heard on the radio and online around the world.