Digging Deep Roots into Jesus

When you visit an amusement park, you get on one ride, then another, then another, going from one exciting experience to the next. But following Christ is not that way. When you believe on Jesus Christ, there's nowhere else to go. Christ is everything you need and more.

Paul wrote this letter to believers in the city of Colosse. They had made professions of faith in Christ and were holding steady in those professions. Meanwhile, they were being inundated by deceptive teachings that threatened to pull them away. These teachings emphasized getting more kinds of knowledge, keeping various manmade rules, and having more fascinating experiences.

Paul wrote this letter to fend off these dangerous and deceptive teachings. He wrote to encourage the believers to be relentless in their faith and to make steady forward progress in their spiritual growth. We get a glimpse at this purpose in Colossians 2:6-7, when he says, “As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in Him and established in the faith, as you have been taught, abounding in it with thanksgiving.” These words urge believers to move forward by focusing squarely on their relationship with Christ.

“As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord” points back to their original professions of faith when they had turned to Christ Jesus as Lord. This was more than a general acknowledgment of the fact that Jesus is Lord. It was a personal embracing of this truth for their own lives.

This phrase also emphasizes the way that they had received him – by faith (Col 1:4), but that leads to another related point - that they were to “walk in him” the same way. Walking is a metaphor that portrays steady progress forward, one step at a time. That’s how the Christian life goes on – it moves forward one step at a time in a progressive, steady manner.A faithful Christian says “no” to the dangerous and deceptive teachings that come along, remaining focused on Christ in a singular way (“in him”). Paul uses three activities to describe the nature of this growth:

• “Rooted in him”
• “Built up in him”
• “Strengthened in the faith”

How do these activities take place? By focusing on sound, biblical teaching about Christ. To grow as a Christian, you do not need new and special knowledge, nor do you need additional experiences, or some rituals and man-made rules.

Instead, you need to sink your roots down deeper into the truth about Jesus – who he is, what he has done, what he is doing, what he will do, and what he has called you to be and do for his glory. You also need to build upon this foundation, increasing in your knowledge of his will as revealed in Scripture and in your obedience to what he has said.

In the first two activities (being "rooted" and being "grounded"), Christ himself is the focal point – he is the soil and the foundation of all your forward progress as a Christian. The third activity, being “strengthened in the faith,” continues this instruction by emphasizing the need to strengthen your understanding of the Christian faith. It refers to more than the act of believing (as in having stronger faith), but to the knowledge of what the Christian faith entails (as in the Christian faith, or Christian doctrine), the sound doctrine that has been revealed by Christ and about Christ. The subsequent phrase, “as you have been taught,” underscores this perspective. When you catch yourself discovering something "new," then you are probably discovering something that’s not true.

With this in mind, Paul highlights a key indicator that you are growing as a Christian – “abounding in it [the Christian faith] with thanksgiving.” Thankfulness, especially towards God, is a mark of genuine, Christ-centered, biblical Christian growth. The more you know, and grow, and go forward in Christ, the more grateful to him you become.

There’s something concerning about a Christian who takes Christ for granted more and more as life goes along. This indicates that either he is not a believer at all, or that he is not giving attention to his growth as a Christian. A Christian who is growing in his walk of faith in Christ increases in his awareness of Christ and in his gratitude for who Christ is and what Christ has done.

In closing, there is something you should know about this process of Christian growth. Rooted, grounded, and established are all passive verbs, which means that there is a sense in which this process is something that happens to you. While these are actions that you participate in as a person, there is also a sense in which someone else – God himself – is bringing about these activities in your life. Christian growth is not something that rests on your shoulders; it is something that God does and which you respond to and cooperate with if indeed you are a genuine child of God.