Sermon Text: Colossians 2:6–15
Date: January 18, 2026
Event: The Second Sunday after Epiphany, Year A

Colossians 2:6–15 (EHV)

Therefore, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to walk in him, 7by being rooted and built up in him, and strengthened in the faith just as you were taught, while you overflow in faith with thanksgiving.

8See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, which are in accord with human tradition, namely, the basic principles of the world, but not in accord with Christ. 9For all the fullness of God’s being dwells bodily in Christ. 10And you have been brought to fullness in him. Christ is the head over every ruler and authority. 11You were also circumcised in him, with a circumcision not done by human hands, in the putting off of the body of flesh, in the circumcision of Christ, 12when you were buried with Christ in baptism. And in baptism you were also raised with him through the faith worked by the God who raised Christ from the dead.

13Even when you were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ by forgiving us all our trespasses. 14God erased the record of our debt brought against us by his legal demands. This record stood against us, but he took it away by nailing it to the cross. 15After disarming the rulers and authorities, he made a public display of them by triumphing over them in Christ.

Your Record Is Nailed to the Cross

It’s amazing what people think they can get away with, especially in our modern era, when we (evidently) have become pretty comfortable installing surveillance in and around our homes and businesses. You pretty much need to assume that if you’re out in public or outside on someone else’s property, you’re probably on camera.

Which can make the brazenness of some people particularly bizarre. You might see or hear someone speaking to police, denying having done this or that, when there’s video evidence (perhaps even from multiple angles) of them doing the exact thing they are denying. Red-light and speed cameras will record people’s license plates, making many cases essentially open-and-shut.

But never was there an open-and-shut case like the one we have before God. The police officer may give you some leeway if you’re driving 71 in a 65, but not so with God. He demands perfection—not our best, not doing better than others—perfection. And unlike the criminal who might be able to sneak around the cameras or wear a mask to obscure his face, there is no lack of evidence against us before God. The omniscient, all-knowing God knows everything that we’ve said, everything that we’ve done, and even everything that we’ve thought that violates his perfection mandate.

So we stand in God’s courtroom, red-handed as red-handed can be. And there’s no leeway with this judge. There’s no lesser sentence, no plea bargain. There’s only one punishment that fits the crime of imperfection and violation of the eternal God’s law: eternal death in hell, being forever separated from any of God’s blessings.

And there’s nothing we can do about any of this by nature. We can’t take back what we’ve done wrong. We can’t do good things to balance out the bad. God describes our spiritual state as “dead,” and just like the person who has died cannot do anything to help themselves, neither can we do anything to spiritually help ourselves. We are dead and condemned, with no hope of fixing anything.

And yet, in our Gospel this morning we heard John the Baptist boldly point to Jesus and proclaim, “Look! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29). This is information we ought to be highly interested in because we can’t get rid of our sin, we can’t scrub our record before God, so if this Jesus is able to do something about it so that maybe—just maybe—we won’t face hell as the eternal punishment for our sins. If that’s true, we would want to know everything about it.

This epiphany season, we continue to see Jesus revealed as he really is because during his time on earth and especially during his ministry, he doesn’t look all that different from anyone else. The booming voice of the Father declared him to be God’s Son at his baptism, and today, through John’s testimony in the Gospel and Paul’s explanation in our Second Reading, we get a clearer idea of who he is, what his work would actually be, and what that all means for us.

Toward the end of our Second Reading, Paul outlines Jesus’ work this way: Even when you were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ by forgiving us all our trespasses. God erased the record of our debt brought against us by his legal demands. This record stood against us, but he took it away by nailing it to the cross. After disarming the rulers and authorities, he made a public display of them by triumphing over them in Christ.

There’s a lot here, so let’s unpack it a bit. First of all, God addresses our spiritual death in a way that we could not. As we noted, just like someone can’t do CPR on themselves, we couldn’t do anything to save ourselves. If we were going to be saved, it had to come from outside of us. And that’s exactly what happened. When you were dead in your trespasses … God made you alive with Christ by forgiving us all our trespasses. Jesus’ death and resurrection result in our resurrection from spiritual death as well.

How? Because Jesus took that iron-clad case that stood against us and obliterated it by nailing it to the cross. He took everything you and I had done wrong and took it upon himself so that our debt became his debt, our eternal sentence became his, and at the cross he paid for it all. There, the Lamb of God took away the world’s sins, which means he took away your sins and my sins. Now we have life from death, now we have freedom from slavery, now we have release from every spiritual power and authority that sought to do us harm, and instead will be safe with our Savior forever.

Paul warned the Colossians, “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, which are in accord with human tradition, namely, the basic principles of the world, but not in accord with Christ.” What do the basic patterns of this world tell us? What is the philosophy and empty deceit of the world? Well, it can come in many flavors, and it’s all eternally destructive.

One popular notion—because we’re all hard-wired to think this way—is what we already mentioned: that we can save ourselves from our sins and do good to make God happy. We can’t and, as we’ve seen, we don’t have to. Jesus did everything for us, which is exactly what we needed and exactly what we have—thanks be to God!

But the world’s philosophy can lead us even further astray, away even from trying to make things up with God and instead questioning whether there is anything to make up for, or actually anyone to make up to. If we deny the existence of sin, the existence of hell, the existence of God’s demands of perfection, or even the existence of God himself, we can trick ourselves into thinking that we’ve found a loophole and gotten ourselves out of the spiritual mess that we innately know that we’re in. Denying God’s existence, then, becomes a popular way to try to soothe and salve the aching conscience.

Of course, you can’t stop a fire in your house by pretending it’s not there, and the vicious disease is not likely to go away without treatment. Deluding ourselves that sin or hell or God himself do not exist, while appealing to the world, is no solution at all. It’s just a twisted game of make-believe that will still result in our condemnation in hell. I can’t will God and my debt to him out of existence by pretending they’re not real.

No, we need an actual solution; we need the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Not only does God, in fact, exist, but he is Immanuel—God with us. Or, as Paul put it: all the fullness of God’s being dwells bodily in Christ. Jesus is true God and true man, which is good, because we needed an eternal, perfect God to take our place under his law, and a sacrificial man to die in our stead. And in Jesus, we have both. Through baptism, we have been connected to both his death and his resurrection. You were buried with Christ in baptism. And in baptism you were also raised with him through the faith worked by the God who raised Christ from the dead.

Jesus is the solution to the problem, not avoiding the problem. This is why we focus on both God’s law and the gospel in our preaching and teaching. We need to be reminded of the gruesome reality of our sin for Jesus’ work to have any meaning at all, but we also need to see Jesus’ triumph as certain and complete so that we do not fall into despair. Not only do we have hope, but we also have confidence in our Savior who gave his life to save ours.

And that truth leads us back to where Paul started our Second Reading: Therefore, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to walk in him, by being rooted and built up in him, and strengthened in the faith just as you were taught, while you overflow in faith with thanksgiving. What is our response to God rescuing us from our sin? Joy! Thanks! Confidence! We walk about our lives in thanksgiving to God because he has saved us. We live our lives the way he wants us to live, not because we think it’ll get us off the hook for things we’ve done wrong, but because Jesus has already crucified those charges that stood against us. We were caught red-handed in our sin, and Jesus took our place so that we are declared “Not Guilty” in God’s court.

In some ways, all of this is the basic truth of the Christian faith. I suppose we could have simply summarized Paul’s words here this morning with that children’s song: Jesus loves me, this I know for the Bible tells me so … Jesus loves me, he who died, heaven’s gates to open wide. What a wonderful gift God has given that through the eyes of faith we can see Jesus as he is—the Lamb of God who has taken away our sins! May this simple truth that leads to eternal life be your guide, focus, and comfort all the days of your life. And may we see our Savior in a new light this morning, freshly rejoicing in his eternal love for us! Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria