Life in Christ brings freedom, parts 1 and 2

Lynne Baab • Friday June 26 2026

Overall theme from January until next month: God’s law is love

Lesson 12: Life in Christ brings freedom, parts 1 and 2 (Colossians 2:6-23)

Key verse: As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith. Colossians 2:6-7a.

Stepping into the Word

The Apostle’s Creed has guided Christians for more than a millennium. The word “creed” comes from the Latin credo, “I believe,” the first two words of the creed. We usually think of a creed as a list of truths, something connected to our brain and our thinking process. Oddly enough, the ancient root meaning behind credo is heart, and our words “cardiac” and “courage” come from the same root. Credo, at the beginning of the Apostle’s Creed, could be paraphrased as “I give my heart to.”

Our English word “believe” also has an interesting etymology. Its root means to care, desire, or love. Perhaps we can paraphrase “I believe” with “I care about, I desire, I love.” The word “beloved” comes from the same root as “believe.”

The meanings of our words today come primarily from the way they have been used in recent years and centuries, not from their roots, so we cannot place too much emphasis on the etymology of words. However, the root meanings of credo and believe resonate with the Bible’s teaching. We give our hearts to God as we affirm truths about God. Believing in God means loving God, and desiring and caring are intimately connected with believing. We are able to care about, desire, and love God because we are already beloved by God. When we turn the Christian faith into a solely cognitive list of truths or rules, we miss God’s intention.

The apostle Paul warns the Colossian Christians not to pay attention to people’s judgment of them related to what they do or don’t do in the area of rules, regulations, laws, and severe treatment of the body. God desires our hearts, not slavish observation of any particular practice. God desires that we live rich and healthy lives, connected to the head of the Body of Christ, growing and bearing good fruit. That connection, rooted in love, is what matters most.

God who created human bodies, help us honor you with our hearts as well as our minds. Help our hands serve you. Keep us connected to you with gratitude and joy.

True reality belongs to Jesus

Paul warns the Christians in Colossae not to accept criticism because they refuse to engage in specific practices as a source of justification before God. Paul includes Jewish practices such as “matters of food and drink or of observing festivals, new moons, or sabbaths” as well as actions that come more from Greek culture, such as “self-abasement and worship of angels, dwelling on visions” (Colossians 2:16 and 18). These, Paul argues, are only a shadow of true reality. The true reality, or substance, “belongs to Christ” (v. 17). Here Paul draws on Platonic philosophy, which affirms that our perceived reality consists of shadows of the real substance. This emphasis on shadow and reality can also be seen in Hebrews 10:1: “The law has only a shadow of the good things to come and not the true form of these realities.”

“Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch” in verse 21 appears to refer to ascetic practices, echoing “self-abasement” in verse 18. This may have including extreme fasting, which can change a person’s mental state, making them more receptive to visions, also mentioned in verse 18. One reason Paul discourages such practices is that they may “puff up” (v. 18), a term also used in 1 Corinthians 8:1: “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” Anything that makes us prideful or boastful about our own accomplishments, without contributing to our love for God and for our neighbors, indicates something amiss in the way that we are following Jesus.

Colossians 2:19, with its reference to “the head, from whom the whole body [is] nourished,” refers back to Colossians 1:18, where Christ is identified as the head and the church as the body. Here the implication is that if one adopts “a human way of thinking” (Colossians 2:18) he or she will be cut off from the head. This reference to a “human way of thinking” and the “human commands and teachings” (v. 22) recall Jesus’s teaching in Mark 7:7 and Matthew 15:9, where Jesus condemns the traditions of the elders and those who “abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition” (Mark 7:8).

Paul notes that that obedience to the Jewish law and engaging in ascetic practices can “have an appearance of wisdom” (Col. 2:23). We can look to “self-imposed piety” and “severe treatment of the body” (v. 23) as a way to feel good about ourselves and impress others. These are essentially self-focused, so they center our thoughts ourselves rather than God, and they have no power to help us grow into Christ’s image.

What rules or forms of self-discipline are you most tempted to follow as a way to feel good about yourself or impress others?

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Next week: Life in Christ brings freedom. Illustration by Dave Baab: Sunset over Wellington, New Zealand

Previous posts about values:

This lesson appeared in the Fall 2023 edition of The Present Word adult Bible study curriculum published by the Presbyterian Publishing Corporation. Used with permission.

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