Beloved Brothers and Sisters in the Lord,

Christians, from the very beginning, have always wrestled with at least two major questions. We find them addressed in Colossians 2:16-23, a most strategic section of Paul’s letter to the believers in the city of Colossae.

Question 1 is, how does one become a Christian in the first place?

Question 2 is, how does one go about living the kind of life that pleases God?

For simplicity’s sake, we might rephrase them this way:

What is the Gospel of Christ?

What is it to be a disciple of Christ?

These are the very issues that are under furious debate today, and this has been the case for two-thousand years! In fact, these were the very concerns that prompted the Apostle Paul to write this letter in the first place, and especially the verses that we will investigate this coming Lord’s Day.

As we work our way through this passage we will discover two competing answers to these questions. One is offered by the false-teachers of Colossae. The other is declared by the Apostle Paul.

As you prepare for worship, it would be very helpful for you to start back in Colossians 2:1 and read and meditate upon the whole chapter as a unit. The radically different and hopelessly irreconcilable answers to these two questions—those offered by the heretics, and those set forth by the Apostle Paul—will become most apparent.