12th December 2025

The false teachings that had crept into the church at Colossae had been addressed by the apostle Paul and members were encouraged to return to the gospel, which was the sole means by which they first came to faith, and to grow in the grace and knowledge of their Lord and Saviour, as proclaimed in that same gospel message. Paul then, in chapter 3 of his letter to the Colossians, gives specific guidelines on how to live a godly life in Christ (vv.1-11).

In writing to the church at Colossae, where false teachers and erroneous doctrines were threatening the fragile faith of that troubled community, the apostle Paul reminds them what true godly living entails, and he begins by setting out before them the one great principle of Christian living (vv.1-4). It is precisely because of our union with Christ that we not only acknowledge him as the risen Lord, but we also confess that we are risen with him.  

Our being raised with Christ is the often neglected ‘other half’ of the gospel. Since our citizenship and our spiritual dwelling is in heaven, our hearts and minds can no longer be devoted to the things of this world as in our former life in the flesh, but must be directed heavenward, from whence our new life in the Spirit has come, and from where our future glory, now hidden with Christ in God, will appear. Our allegiance is no longer to our old master, sin, which operated through the fallen nature in which we once walked in the flesh and under the domain of the law, but to Jesus, in whom we are united together, and who now sits on the throne of highest honour and in the place of holiness, who alone is our rightful Lord.

Jesus is the sole substance of our new life in the Spirit, the single one true element in which that new life moves. To appreciate and understand the reality and the implications of our union with him is the one great principle that governs the Christian life. We simply cannot live as we formerly did before we found faith and newness of life in Christ. All the vain and futile things that once reigned through the sinful nature, Paul instructs us must be mortified, cut out, and put away. We live the Christian life on earth, but it’s not an earthly life, we must ‘put to death’ those things that have no place in the new realm of the Spirit in which we now live and walk under the constraining power of grace, being inwardly renewed in the likeness of our Creator and Saviour (vv.5-9).

It is true that, as we survey the broad, culture-peppered landscape of our Christian heritage, legitimate differences can be observed which decorate and adorn the spirit-woven patchwork fabric of the vibrant and dynamic universal church. There are diversities of gifts, of worship style and musical taste, of language and dress, of social convention and social status, of ethnicity and colour; but in none of these do we find the essence of the gospel or locate those essential characteristics that are distinctly Christian. Jesus is the essence of the gospel, and all things find their legitimate expression in him: for ‘…there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all’ (v.11).

Local congregation:
Grace Communion Peterborough
Farcet Village Hall                             
Main Street
Farcet
Peterborough
PE7 3AN

Meeting time:
Sunday 11.00 am

Local congregational contact:
Richard Dempsey
Email:  richard.dempsey@btinternet.com
Local church website: GRACE COMMUNION CHURCH PETERBOROUGH – Landing Page

Word of Life contact:
wordoflife@gracecom.church