What Colossians Says About Salvation: Part 1

Today we'll be looking at the theme of salvation in Colossians by way of answering three important questions.

Who Worked Salvation Out?
To answer this, we'll start with Colossians 1:21-22:

"Once you were alienated and hostile in your minds because of your evil actions. But now He has reconciled you by His physical body, through His death to present you holy, faultless, and blameless before Him."

The first thing I noticed in this passage is how it focuses on Christ working our salvation out. It starts with us being alienated and hostile in our minds because of our evil actions, our sin, and then He reconciled us by His physical body, through His death so that we may be presented before Him. He did everything. We learn that later in Colossians 2:13-14: "And when you were dead ... He made you alive with Him and forgave us ... He erased the certificate of death ... and has taken it out of the way by nailing it to the cross." We were dead people; we could do nothing. It was He who was able to work our salvation out and raise us from our old, lifeless selves to new creations. It starts with sin, our evil desires which separate us from God. But then Jesus' atoning death saves us. We're new creatures. Now we have a responsibility ...

What Must We Do Once We're Saved?

"Therefore put to death what belongs to your worldly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desire, and greed, which is idolatry ... But now you must also put away all the following: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and filthy language from your mouth. Do not lie to one another since you have put off the old self with its practices." (Colossians 3:5, 8-9)

My dad got a sweatshirt for Christmas with a famous John Owen quote: "Be killing sin or sin will be killing you." Profound and true. Once we've been saved, we have a responsibility. What we once served, we must now slay. We must daily be putting sin to death. Romans 6:8, 10-11 sheds a little more light on this - "Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. ... For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus." (emphasis mine) Our duty as Christians is to put sin to death. But what does that really mean? It means to literally remove each sin from our lives permanently. This isn't a temporary thing; it's for good. We need to get rid of sin, or, you see, sin will get rid of us.

We have one more question to answer, but we'll save that for the next post. What is that question? you wonder. I'll leave it for you to ponder on - How must we live once we're saved?